You set the utilisation target at 90%. The queue set the delivery date.

Billable utilisation and delivery reliability are usually treated as separate metrics. In practice, one of them quietly determines the other, and rarely in the direction owners expect.

By Steve 5 min read
Abstract bridge artwork for You set the utilisation target at 90%. The queue set the delivery date.

Two things are often true of the same professional services firm in the same quarter: the utilisation report is the best it has been in two years, and clients are waiting longer than they were told they would. These are not competing facts to be reconciled. They are the same fact, described twice. The relationship is not a management failing or a scheduling oversight. It is arithmetic, and it is well understood in queueing theory: which is a slightly forbidding name for the study of what happens when work arrives…

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