Versions Compared

Key

  • This line was added.
  • This line was removed.
  • Formatting was changed.


Info

To see your utilization data at the project level you will want to switch from the Utilization report to the Ginsu report.

This is one of Projector's most often asked questions. It seems like a simple request. Projector has utilization information. For instance, Charlie has 70% billable utilization and 30% non-billable utilization. Let's break his billable utilization up by project and see where that 70% is coming from. However, when you go to run your utilization report, no project fields are available. Why?!!!

To explain, you first need to be absolutely clear that utilization is a concept at the whole resource level. It can only successfully compute when looking at an individual person or a group of individuals. This tells you useful information such as Charlie is overworked, or the creative department is underutilized. What you can't do is compute utilization on a project. The problem is that projects aren't people. Projects can be over budget, they can be under budget, but they can't be 110% utilized. Another way to frame it is like this - if Sally is overutilized because she works 20 hours on one project and 30 hours on another, which project was responsible for her being overutilized?

Projector has a way of answering this question, just framed in a different way than you were expecting. To get started, let's introduce two concepts in our reporting. We call them Above the Resource and Below the Resource.

  • Above the resource - Data about a single resource or groups of resources like departments. It makes sense and calculating utilization is possible.
  • Below the resource - Data that rolls up into a resource. Like three projects that a resource worked on. It does not make sense and calculating utilization is impossible. If you need data at this level we recommend using Resource Equivalents (REs) instead of Utilization. Read on to learn more.


Warning
titleException

There is one exception to the above rules, if you are looking for utilization by engagement type, you can do that in the utilization report. Reason being, we move engagement type data out of row fields and into data fields. We accomplish this by creating a data field for each engagement type. So if you had five engagement types, you would have five new data fields. We can't realistically do this for every project level metric as the number of data fields needed would be enormous. As data field are always at the bottom of a pivot table, you don't need to worry about above/below the resource.


...

Tip
titleInfinity Always Shown

The <<Utilization>> "project" is categorized as non-billable by Projector. If you have any filters that remove this project from the report, then it will also remove the UBH and cause all your utilization numbers to go infinite. Make sure that on your report wizard filter fields tab and parameters tab that you aren't filtering out non-billable engagements. If you have filters setup within Excel, ensure the same.


Tip
titleAdditional Resources

The Topic of the Day: Utilization webinar is a great resource to learn about managing and measuring resource utilization with Projector. (go to 14:21)

Am I Above or Below?

This question is a bit hard to answer without knowing your specific report requirements, so I'll provide a few example questions and then a visual tip for figuring it out.

...