Name: Unlocking Project Performance ROI: Plan Smarter
Uploaded: 2026-08-13T13:00:40.350Z
Duration: 13 min
Description: Unlocking Project Performance ROI: Plan Smarter

Transcript for "Unlocking Project Performance ROI: Plan Smarter": Welcome back. This is episode two of the series, and thanks for joining. I'm Richard McCulloch. I'm a solution engineer here at Dartech. Last time, we looked at winning 1% more of the right work, and today, we're looking at utilization. I wanna start something odd that I see in almost all the firms I speak with, but as usual, icekeeping first. So audio is through the computer, so volume up. There's no dialing for this webinar. Slides and recordings will be available afterwards. Please put questions in the q and a, and I'll pick them up as we go along, or I'll fly in after the session because it is only a new short session. And a quick recap for anyone new. This is a four part series where it's one stage in project life cycle per episode. They're short, like I said, ten minute episodes. So easy easy to digest. And we ask the same question each time. What's 1%, percentage improvement worth at this stage, and how could you get there? Last time, we looked at winning the right work. Today, we're looking at planning, the planning of the team. And next episode is about fee recovery margin, and then we will end on on analysis. So here's the odd thing. Most firms I speak with don't actually have a utilization problem. I've actually got two. One person is often overloaded because every urgent project finds its way to them, and somewhere else in business, often, you know, just an office over, someone with similar skills has got a gap next week. So it's too much capacity, not enough capacity, same firm, same week. And that's not a work harder problem. It's a it's a visibility problem. You can usually see who's busy in your own team. That's usually reasonably easy. What's much harder is seeing capacity across studios, offices, and disciplines. And that's where utilization quietly leaks away. Let's run through an example of what that might cost you and and on our example firm lock study from the first episode, and how it could actually be the most expensive hour in your firm. So let's imagine a project is delayed, and a senior consultant at our fictitious firm, Rocksteady, the same one we used in episode one, becomes available from Wednesday. The same week, another team under deadline pressure and in a different office brings in a subcontractor with the same skills, same dates, six weeks of cover, costing them about 15,000. Nobody did anything wrong here. Right? The team that bought the cover couldn't see the consultant availability. So, you know, sensible decisions on both sides. But this is an example but then in this example, Rockstudies actually paid twice for the same hour. They paid once in salary, once in third party invoice costs. And firms buy more than they realise because often the hiring third party decision is in a different system or a disconnecting system from the resource planning systems being able to see who's on the bench. So and this doesn't have to bite you only if you're a multi multi office business. It can it can bite you at any size business. And here's problem two. Someone's too busy, and then in this example, the work lands on the person who's already the busiest because everybody trusts that person to get it done. Maybe they're the yes person. Right? That person's hours are already fully captured and fully utilized. So squeezing them further doesn't create capacity. It just moves the costs off the p and l and into overtime. You know, quality can slip, especially at the edges, and and worst case scenario, it could be a resignation letter from one of your top employees. So remember remember the two problems from the start. Right? Someone overloaded, someone available, same firm, same week. They're the same problem, and the same fix applies to both. The reason cover got bought unnecessarily, and the reason your best person keeps absorbing everyone else's work is that nobody can see the available person in time. You fix the visibility, and you're not asking the busy person for more. You're giving the available person the work instead. So here's the question I'd like to take to your finance team. What do we spend on freelance sub consultant staff last year or last month, and how many of our own hours went and billed in the same month or year, depending on how you wanna analyze it. Right? And if those two numbers surprise you, that could be where your 1% is lying. And I appreciate, right, there are times when you genuinely need specialists and third party consultants with niche skills. But when you've got people in house with the same skill, but their availability is hidden, that's a different story because you've got disconnected systems. So I'll say it again. You know, fix your availability. Fix your visibility, sorry, and you're gonna get a genuine opportunity to increase your utilization, not just not just rebalance it. So let's see, what a 1% increase would be worth to our example firm, Rocksteady. So the example firm, Rocksteady, that we we used in episode one, they're a 90 person business. 65 of those employees are fee earners. Let's say they they've got eighteen hundred hours available, per year, to to work on projects, and they're currently running at a 66% utilization. A one percentage point increase in utilization can be achieved by doing eighteen hours per person per year onto billable projects. And that's just twenty five minutes a week, not a transformative program. Right? No. Not longer hours. We're talking about twenty five minutes of each person's existing week pointing at billable work instead of leaking away. And an average charge out rate of, say, £100 an hour, that's a £117,000 of annual fee capacity from a 1% increase twenty five minutes a week. Now let's be clear about what that number is because I'm sure there's some finance hat wearing people listening. It's capacity. Right? It's not automatic cash. It only becomes money if one of the four routes are true. Right? You sell it as new fees. You cut freelance subconsulted costs. You defer a higher. You protect margin on a fixed fee project. And the route is gonna depend on your business and your backlog and how you how you see it. So what does that number look like for your firm? And where do you sit, you know, in in comparison to the industry today? In the 2026 SPI benchmarking report, it puts the average billable utilization for professional services firms at 66.4. The lowest level actually recorded below even the previous, low set in 2024. So so why is it falling? I think there are many reasons, and I think, you know, hybrid work is one, more fragmented teams is another, and I think project start volatility. Ultimately, I think it boils down to planning is actually becoming genuinely harder. Meanwhile, the top firms are at 75%, and that's not because necessarily they're working people harder. It's it's more of the the planning discipline employed in them. And and so an important caveat here is we're not trying to achieve a 100%. Right? Some some non billable time is necessary. You know, we need business development time. We need leadership time. We need training time. We need recovery time. So we're not aiming to be you know, a 100% utilized on on billable projects. The opportunity, I suppose, is is is separating the useful non billable from the avoidable waste. And and and this is definitely starting to buy, I think, strategically for a number of firms because for for the great number of firms I've spoken to, growth is actually constrained actually by the execution capacity rather than demand. You know, winning the work necessarily isn't the bottleneck. It's staffing it, which makes capacity actually, the capacity you own, one of the actually cheapest growth levers you're actually gonna find, out there of all these 1% ones we've been talking about. So have a think about this for a second. Utilization is not a a people metric. It's a planning metric. A person on the bench is almost never the problem. You know, it's the plan that put them there or the lack of plan that put them there. And while we're on the metric itself, I've I've heard a number of firms argue that utilization is actually yesterday's measure, and and now revenue per per employee is what matters matters more. And, especially, you know, with AI shortening, the hours it takes to take to do tasks, there's definitely some truth in that. But the two aren't rivals. Utilization tells you whether you're utilizing what you've paid for, and revenue, per employee tells you whether it's worth paying for them. And you can't improve the second without with the first one leaking. So if planning is a problem, you know, what is what is what does better planning actually look like? So let's review the rock steady example from earlier and then the 15000. Remember what happened again? A project slipped, your your specialist, came in came free from Wednesday, And the same week, a different team, different office bought a contractor, subcontractor with the same skills. No one did anything wrong. No one could no one could see across. That that was the issue, it's visibility. A connected plan changes that one moment. The person rolling off shows up in the same view the other team is staffing from. So the one who's free is visible, and at that point the cover gets bought, or the cover doesn't need to get bought, should I say. So the 15,000 never gets spent. And because that view can even with a connected system can even reach the pipeline, you can see the work likely to land in a few weeks. So rather than hitting the bench, that person is already lined up against the next project. You know, fieners know when the next deal is likely to come in. Resourcing know, who's free. Finance know what it's worth. The plan starts before the contract is signed. And notice this isn't a capability, you know, you don't have. It's the same information you already hold, but it's it's connected in the moment the decision actually gets made. And that's where AI earns its place, actually. Not assigning your people, but catching them rolling off or overloading early and flagging it to whoever decides. You know, AI recommends and and and you decide. That's that's I feel like that's definitely the world we're moving towards. Right? So before we go, one last thing worth doing. You go and ask your finance team what, the question from earlier. What are we spending on freelancers or sub consultants last year or last period? How many of our own hours went and billed in that period, year? Do those numbers surprise you? Is that where a 1% is actually hiding for your business? If you you want help putting your number on it and it's value, we run these forty five minute working sessions. They're not demos or sales calls or software. You you bring your numbers, how many billable staff you've got, what your available hours are, what your current utilization is, what your current average charge out rate is, and we can build the calculations against live benchmarks that you've seen today. We can create your business case, straight away at the end of the meeting. Obviously, not using Rocksteady's numbers using your own. Something you can put in front of your board. I think on the screen now, there'll be a poll that you can you can, click, yes to, and the team will come back to you with available dates for for a workshop. Next episode, we're moving from planning their work to delivering it and asking what one percentage improvement of project margin would look like and what is it worth, and also where it goes missing. I hope you found today useful, and thanks for joining. Thanks.