Created 11 December 2024
What is Resource Utilization?
Resource utilization is a KPI (or metric) of resource planning used to help project managers and senior management understand performance and effort over a specific amount of time. It measures your team's productivity and can help you understand if your organization is over or underutilizing resources.
A resource's utilization is determined by the total number of billable hours worked divided by the total number of hours available. For example, if a team member books 34 hours in one week against client projects and they have 40 hours available in the week, then their utilization rate is . 85, or 85%.
Why should I be concerned about utilization?
Utilization of resources is important for maintaining productivity, because it prevents employees from underperforming or being overburdened by workloads and burning out. It will help you accurately forecast and plan future projects. It will help you make better decisions at the beginning of planning to avoid reworking schedules and assigning tasks. It will also help you make sure that the right resources are assigned to a project.
What is required to measure utilization?
To measure resource utilization, it is important that each billable resource has a utilization target based on the total number of available hours. In the User settings, under the CAPACITY tab, the working hours per day and target utilization percentage should be entered:
For information, please refer to this article.
How do I create a utilization performance dashboard and report?
Project data is continually changing and reporting on that data can be challenging. In PSOhub, you can create a snapshot of the what is happening right now with your organization's resource utilization.
Choose from the menu Resource Management > Utilization Report:
The following page appears:
Click the Create button to continue.
The Utilization report New edit window appears, where you can select the data to report on.
The table below will explain the fields:
Field | Description |
Report date | By default, today's date is selected as the date the report was created. You can click on the calendar to select an alternative date. |
Report name | Enter the name of the report to be generated. |
Report period | From the drop-down list, select the period to based the report on:
|
Include week report | Select this check box if you want to create a weekly utilization report in addition to the default monthly report. |
Business Unit | Each business unit can have a pre-defined utilization target. This is configured in your organization's Business Unit settings:  Select the business unit(s) to base the report on. For example:  If this field is left empty, the report will display utilization across all business units. |
Project roles | If necessary, you can select specific roles for the selected business units to view the utilization or leave this field empty to see all roles.
If a resource has multiple roles assigned to him/her, PSOhub will always display the overall utilization of this resource, all roles combined, and not just the role selected in this field. |
Include draft Include internal Include holiday Include absence | These unbillable hours are not included in the utilization report but can be used for actual data. Select these check boxes if you want to include them in the report. |
Click the Save button to generate the report.
Once the report is generated, click on it to open it:
Below, you will see the business unit (HF Consulting) and utilization target line (80%). This is the utilization target percentage that the business unit is expected to reach based on Planned hours. You can immediately see that for this year, Q1 and Q3 has been severely underutilized and not hitting target. However from May to August the results are brighter.
If you hover over any one of the month's utilization bars, you will see the pop-up displaying the exact result:
By clicking on the name of the business unit in the graph, you can drill down to see the individual performance scorecards of the resources matching the reported roles:
Here, you can see which resources are under-performing or over-performing based on their personal utilization target, indicated alongside their name:
Close this window to return to the graph and click on the Actuals tab. The results will display the actual utilization based on time logged. In this example, the results are rather exaggerated:
With the above results it is evident that the resources for the business unit have been severely under-utilized. This represents a state where valuable skills and expertise remain underused, resulting in inefficiency, decreased profitability, and suboptimal resource management.
Let's move on and click on the Resources tab:
The Resources tab will present all the resources for the selected business unit(s). This view will show the planned versus actuals by percentage and hours for each month or if selected, the week:
Important: Non-billable hours (draft projects, internal projects, absence or holidays) are not included in the utilization calculation. If you selected draft or internal projects, absence or holidays to be included in the report, this data can be hidden to give a true reflection of the utilization. In the graph's legend, the non-billable data can be clicked on to grey it out and the data will be hidden from the graph:
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