Table of contents
- Utilization - what does it exactly mean and how to set it up?
- Utilization affects the billable capacity - how does that work? [movie]
- How does Primetric show Overbooking?
Capacity & Utilization - how are they calculated in Primetric?
Capacity is the maximum amount of work that can be completed in a given period.
Calculation formula: number of working hours a day * number of working days (in a selected period)
Working days are the sum of the maximum number of days when your team member is available for you.
Calculation formula: number of days in a chosen period - (public holidays + vacations)
Example
Bob is a full-time employee with 2 days of absence in March.
Bob's capacity in March is equal: (31 days - (9 days of public holidays + 2 days of absence)) * 8h = 20 working days * 8h a day = 160h.
Scheduled Utilization is the amount of work that you planned for your team members in relation to capacity.
Calculation formula: number of scheduled hours in a chosen period/capacity in a chosen period
Tracked Utilization is the amount of work that your team members worked in relation to capacity.
Calculation formula: number of tracked hours in a chosen period/capacity in a chosen period
Example
If we plan to work 140 hours in March for Bob, his Scheduled Utilization level is equal: 140h/160h = 88%
If Bob logged 120 hours of his work in March, his Tracked Utilization level is equal: 120h/160h = 75%.
So, Bob was working 13% less than you expected and theoretically, he was available in March at 25% of his time.
How utilization can be set up in Primetric?
Utilization - what exactly does it mean, and how to set it up?
Utilization is one of the information you will fill out when assigning employees to the project.
Utilization, in a nutshell, is the amount of time you’d like your employee to work on the project. You can choose % of employee capacity, utilization in a chosen time frame, weekday utilization (by an hour or by % of capacity), and no utilization. We will go over each one of those options.
Utilization by capacity
Choosing this option allows you to tell the system how much of the overall capacity of your employee you want to use on this project. Let’s say your employee, Francis, works full time, usually about 160 hours. The capacity of your employee can be set in his profile, in “Settings”. If we put his % of capacity on the project to 50%, this will inform the system to assign 80h from that month towards that project.
Please note that you can also choose weekdays in this option, for example, 100% capacity for Monday and Friday.
As we can in this screenshot, our project only chose 50% of Francis's available capacity.
There are also the options such as use billable capacity and utilization affects the billable capacity but we will talk about it in the next segment.
Utilization by Time Frame
In a Time frame you can assign an amount of time to a certain timeframe.
You can choose from Day, Week, Month, or whole Assignment. Then, you can select several hours in that particular time frame. You can also decide how to distribute that utilization by selecting workdays.
Let’s take a look at different examples.
If we set Day as a time frame and set 4 hours, Primetric will assign each working day 4 hours on that project. If we change it to a Week and decide that our employee will work 32 hours, Primetric will split those 32 hours to 6 hours and 24 minutes each day. While choosing a month, Primetric will take the number of workdays in said month, and distribute hours and minutes accordingly. The same will happen with the assignment.
So, what will happen if we decide to assign a number of hours and minutes that are not easily divided, like 37 hours and 17 minutes per week?
As we can see, Primetric divided that time into two groups, so that the sum of the assigned daily time will reflect how much we assigned per week. Primetric will always try to distribute time as close to even as possible.
There are also two options here - Adjust schedules to time offs and adjust scheduling to public holidays. Both of those options allow us to take time off and public holidays into consideration while calculating daily utilization, based on information we provided. Let’s take a look at this example.
Francis will have time off from the 1st to the 11th of July. We have assigned him 40 hours per week, by choosing a week in the time frame and 40 hours in time. By unchecking Adjust scheduling to time offs, Primetric will assign 8 hours to each weekday, despite the time off.
Let’s check that box, and choose the option Reduce utilization by time off.
Primetric will now skip those days entirely, while simultaneously not changing daily hour utilization. Those time off days are treated as if they were available, but they don’t have any time assigned to them, thus changing weekly utilization from 20 hours to 12 hours for that particular week.
Let’s check that box, and choose the option Schedule utilization outside time off.
As you can see, now Primetric recalculated daily utilization in weeks where time off occurs, to match our desired weekly utilization.
It will work in the same way for Public Holidays. Please note, since this change affects daily utilization, it will not change daily utilization if we had chosen “Daily” in the time frame, other than including or excluding off/holiday days.
Utilization by Weekday
Here, you can assign the desired amount of hours per weekday. As you can see, there are also options to include or exclude time off/holiday, but as mentioned earlier, since this is daily utilization, Primetric takes this value as an absolute and will not change it whether we check those adjusted scheduling to time offs/public holidays boxes or not.
Utilization by Weekday by capacity
The next type is “Weekday by capacity”. This type allows us to assign % of capacity for each day. We can choose to use billable capacity, meaning that Primetric will assign this % capacity out of currently available capacity (more on that in the next segment).
No utilization
Last but not least is “No utilization”. It’s pretty simple - if you do not want to plan work for your employee, but give him the possibility to log time in the project - we can simply choose this type and Primetric will not assign him any working hours towards this project.
Utilization affects the billable capacity - how does that work?
As I mentioned earlier, while selecting utilization you can choose two additional options - use billable capacity and utilization affects the billable capacity. Those two options are intertwined, as in one is dependent on the other.
In a nutshell, utilization affects the billable capacity checked, which means that the utilization you have chosen for that project for your employee will affect the amount of billable capacity for that employee. If you assign your employee to a project with 50% capacity, check utilization affects the billable capacity, and then schedule another project in the same time frame, by checking use billable capacity, any capacity you choose for that project will affect the capacity that is left. The best way to understand this concept is to show it in the example.
We want to assign our employee, Francis, to two projects. We want to be sure that the utilization we set for the first project will affect the capacity of our employee (for example, if in the future we would like to assign him to more projects in the same timeframe). We are sure that in the first project, Francis will be required to use 25% of his whole capacity for the entire time. Let’s set this up.
We set 25% capacity, and checked utilization affects the billable capacity box. This is how it will look like in the employee's calendar.
Now let’s add another project. This time we have decided that out of the capacity our employee has left we will assign 100% of it. For this, to work we also need to check use billable capacity.
Now let’s see how it looks in the calendar.
As you can see, Primetric assigned 50% of the “leftover” capacity to our second project.
If you have set your first project to cover the whole capacity (100%), Primetric will not assign any hours in that timeframe, as seen in this screenshot.
Please note, that with that system you still can overbook hours. If you for example add another project that will use billable capacity and set said the capacity to 100%, you will end up with a situation where your employee is overbooked. The same can happen if you set two projects that will affect billable capacity, and their overall % capacity will be over 100%.
How does Primetric show Overbooking?
Overbooking is a situation when you assign more work for your employee than his capacity. This will only take any other active assignments into account. When this happens, Primetric will alert you with a notification.
Information about overbooking will also appear during adding or changing utilization. Before unveiling the “Utilization” tab you will see this triangle with an exclamation mark, informing you about overbooking, and how many hours are overbooked.
Once you click on the “Utilization” option, you will also be met with a simplified time frame informing you where overbooking is occurring. You will see a violet bar covering part of the time where overbooking occurs, here on the screenshot we can estimate it’s from around March to the end of May.