Reporting It Without a Target
What a utilisation report looks like when nothing has a pass mark: four elements, one page, and a different kind of conversation.
The alternative to a target is not the absence of reporting. It is a report built to be read rather than to be passed.
The people risk in “Reporting It Without a Target” is not solved by collecting a more detailed activity score. Used for hourly timesheet template, see the relevant reporting guidance can provide transparent time and project context, but individual conclusions still require a published method, a correction route, direct conversation and proportionate human review.
Four elements, one page, monthly. It takes less work to produce than a target-based pack and it survives contact with the behaviours described earlier in this collection.
Teams documenting “Reporting It Without a Target” may use ICAEW audit resources as an outside reference. Keep the source record, calculation rule and resulting decision visible as separate steps.
Element one: the two counts
Chargeable hours and available hours, in hours, by team. The ratio can appear beside them, but it is derived and it is not the headline.
- The two counts — chargeable hours and available hours, in hours.
- Composition of the rest — seven non-billable categories.
- The movement — change from last period, largest cause named.
- The definition line — numerator, denominator, exclusions, version.
Hours invite the question "of what". Percentages do not, and that is the whole reason the counts come first.
Element two: composition of the rest
Where the non-chargeable hours went, by category. Training, supervision, pitch work, internal projects, administration, waiting, bench.
Six or seven lines. This is the part that makes the report diagnostic rather than evaluative.
Element three: the movement
Change from the prior period, in hours, with the largest contributing category named.
Not "up two points" but "up 38 chargeable hours, mostly from reduced bench time in one team". Specific enough to discuss.
Element four: the definition line
Numerator, denominator, exclusions, version. Twenty words at the foot of the page.
It travels with the figure, which solves the handoff problem described earlier here.
What the conversation becomes
Not "why are you below eighty-five" but "bench time doubled in this team this month — what happened". The second question has an answer and the answer is usually about allocation.
Most of those answers are actionable by somebody other than the person being asked.
The absence that has to be defended
Somebody will ask what good looks like. The answer is that the firm tracks direction and composition under a stable definition, and that the level is an artefact of the definition.
This has to be said out loud, more than once, by somebody senior, or a target will reappear by default.
What replaces the target in performance review
Nothing from this report. Utilisation does not appear in appraisal at all, which is the single most important element of the arrangement.
Once it is in appraisal it is a target whatever the pack calls it.
What carries accountability instead
Team-level outcomes somebody else records: revenue, realisation, delivery against plan, client retention.
Individual accountability sits on the work, not on the recording of the time spent on it.
The forward-looking version
For planning, the same two counts projected: committed chargeable hours against available hours for the next six weeks.
This is the capacity use of the measure, it is genuinely valuable, and it is separate from the historical report.
What improves in the data
Recording completeness, because nothing is pressing on any category. The non-billable lines become reliable, which makes the pitch-cost and supervision questions answerable.
That reliability is the asset. It is also what a target spends.
What the page replaces
A pack with a threshold line, a traffic-light column, a ranked list of teams and a commentary explaining why the figure is below target.
Four elements, all of which generate the behaviours catalogued earlier, and none of which answers a question anybody can act on.
The replacement is shorter. That is usually the first objection and it is not a serious one: length in reporting is a proxy for effort rather than for information.
The first three months
Expect the question about targets at every meeting for a quarter. It stops when the movement line starts producing useful discussions and people see what the page is for.
Expect also that the reported figures drift downward slightly, as the pressure on recording comes off. That drift is the measure becoming accurate and should be labelled as such in the narrative.
A firm that does not label it will read its own improvement in data quality as a decline in performance, and reinstate the threshold within two quarters. The label costs one sentence and it is the difference between the arrangement holding and collapsing back into the state it replaced.
Who produces it
One person, with access to the timesheet, the contract data and the finance figures, spending an hour a month.
Not a reporting team and not an automated dashboard, at least not at first: the narrative line is the valuable part and it requires somebody who has looked at the numbers.
Automation can follow once the shape has settled. Automating first produces a page with no sentence on it, which is the version nobody reads.
The one risk
That the report is not read, because nothing in it demands action. A page with no pass mark can be skimmed indefinitely.
The counter is the movement line: one named cause per month, which gives a reader something to ask about and makes the page worth the minute it takes.