Available hours are not eight a day
They are the hours of each person’s actual schedule: minus the holidays on their calendar, vacation and time off. Measuring against a flat eight hours gives an optimistic figure that never holds.
An example
A technician has 32 available hours this week, because Thursday is a holiday, and 40 hours assigned across three projects. Her utilization is 125%. Before you promise a date to a fourth customer, something has to move.
How to read it
- Above 100%: overbooked. Something will be late.
- Close to 100% for weeks: there is no room for the unexpected, and the unexpected always shows up.
- Very low: either there is spare capacity or there is work nobody is planning.
The usual mistake
Looking at it only for the team as a whole. A team at 80% can have one person at 140% and another at 20%. The average hides exactly the bottleneck that delays projects.