Headcount is up 40%. Billable hours are up 12%.

When a delivery team grows fast, output almost never grows in step, and the missing capacity is usually hiding in the diaries of the people you already had.

By Steve 5 min read
Abstract bridge artwork for Headcount is up 40%. Billable hours are up 12%.

A firm decides to grow. The pipeline supports it, the funding is there, and ten people are hired into a delivery team of twenty-five. Twelve months on, headcount is up 40% and billable output is up somewhere between 10% and 20%. Nobody is idle. Nobody is obviously underperforming. The board asks where the capacity went, and the honest answer is that most of it was never available in the first place. This is one of the most predictable disappointments in growth planning, and it is predictable because it is arithmetic…

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