The Day It Became a Target
A measure and a target are different instruments. The moment a utilisation figure acquires a threshold, what it measures changes.
A utilisation figure can be read or it can be hit. These are different uses, they are rarely distinguished, and the transition from the first to the second is usually a single sentence in a meeting.
The people risk in “The Day It Became a Target” is not solved by collecting a more detailed activity score. Used for workforce analytics software, workforce analytics software for professional services can provide transparent time and project context, but individual conclusions still require a published method, a correction route, direct conversation and proportionate human review.
Once a threshold exists, the number stops describing the week and starts describing the relationship between people and the threshold.
Teams documenting “The Day It Became a Target” may use FASB accounting standards as an outside reference. Keep the source record, calculation rule and resulting decision visible as separate steps.
What the measure did before
Answered a question: how much of our capacity went to client work, and what did the rest go to. Composition and direction.
- As a measure: how much capacity went to client work, and what the rest went to.
- As a target: whether each person's recorded hours clear a threshold.
The answer was useful because nobody had a reason to shape it.
What the target does
Converts the question into a test with a pass mark. Everybody who records time now has an interest in the result.
The data stops being an observation and becomes an output of the people being observed.
Why this is not about dishonesty
The responses that degrade the figure are mostly legitimate. Booking ambiguous time to the client rather than internal. Deferring non-billable work. Taking the chargeable task over the useful one.
Each is defensible in isolation. In aggregate they move the number without moving the firm.
The speed of it
Faster than most people expect. Visible movement in one quarter, substantial in two.
The behaviour section here sets out eight specific responses, which is not an exhaustive list and is enough to account for several points.
What is lost
The measure's ability to inform. A figure that people are managing toward no longer tells you what it told you before the target existed.
That loss is permanent for as long as the target is in force, and it is rarely counted as a cost of introducing one.
Why targets get set anyway
Because a bare measure feels inert. A board asked "what are you doing about this" is better served by a target than by an explanation of composition.
The target is a management artefact for the conversation, not an instrument for the work.
The intermediate position
Report the figure, publish the composition, set no threshold, and discuss movements. This keeps the measurement intact.
It requires somebody senior to defend the absence of a target, which is harder than setting one, and is the reason it is uncommon.
What can carry a target instead
Outcomes the individual does not record themselves: revenue per head, realisation, client retention, delivery against plan.
These are gameable too, but not by the person's own data entry, which removes the most direct route.
The question before setting one
What will we do when the target is met? If the answer is "raise it", the target is not a threshold and everybody will work this out.
A target that only ratchets produces the behaviours and none of the benefits, because meeting it is never a resting point.
The question after setting one
What stopped being recorded? This can be checked: look at the non-billable categories and see which ones shrank.
Categories that fall to near zero after a target is introduced were not eliminated. They stopped being written down.
The sentence that does it
"We should be aiming for eighty-five." Said once, in a meeting, without a decision being recorded.
No policy is written, nothing changes in the reporting, and within a month everybody who records time knows the number. A target does not require a process to come into existence; it requires one statement by somebody senior enough.
That is worth knowing because it means a firm can acquire a target it never decided to have, and then spend two years managing its consequences.
Removing one that arrived this way
Harder than it sounds, because there is no document to rescind. The removal also has to be a statement, repeated, by somebody senior.
Saying it once is not enough: people assume the expectation persists informally, which is a reasonable assumption given how it arrived.
The reliable signal is the reporting itself. A pack that stops showing a threshold line, and a review process that stops containing the figure, communicate the removal better than any announcement, because they change where the consequence sits rather than what is said about it.
Keeping the two uses apart
A firm can read a figure and never set a mark against it. That is the whole distinction, and it is maintained by one discipline: the number appears in operational reporting and nowhere that carries a consequence.
Boards accept this when it is explained. Managers accept it when they are given something else to be accountable for.
What does not work is keeping the threshold and insisting the measure is still diagnostic.
The reversible version
If a target is unavoidable, set it on a team rather than a person, at a level already being achieved, for a stated period, with the composition published beside it.
That form does the least damage, and the damage it does is still real.