This appears to be a topic for the ages. Our group has had a lot of
dialogue about time, utilization, travel, et al. I can tell you that my
consultants charge their travel time to a separate account that we track
and monitor. Given today’s travel environment, it’s not unusual to have
multiple hour travel delays on each side of a trip. I recently had a 20
hour day for a two hour client meeting.

The key for us is the consultant bonus is tied to chargeability. We track
travel, training, sick, vacation, business development, and a whole host
of other times, but compensation is tied to utilization. We rarely have a
client that pays for travel, so tracking it is to understand individual
work life balances. We strive to get people local, especially if they have
recently been on a difficult travel assignment.

We don’t set limits to charge for any account, but we do monitor for
abuses. The issue of charging time to business development is a very
sensitive one. On one hand, we need the help of our practitioners to
assist with proposal efforts, while on the other hand, the cost of sales
skyrockets with every hour charged to business development. This is an
area that I monitor closely as it is an area for abuse.

I prefer the old model where practitioners helped with proposals,
recruiting, etc, in the off hours and received bonuses, raises, and
promotions because of their extra efforts. Unfortunately, we have
become an industry of metrics.

I don’t have any answers, only a shared problem.

Joe G.

The last paragraph of your post is probably the most important.  You state there that about 50% of your team’s time is NOT billable.  With that in mind, I would worry less about travel time and more on simply tracking time related to productive utilization.  Create important metrics for everything related to generating value to both the pre and post sales experience for prospects and customers.

Travel time is a difficult metric to manage because you are forced to consider travel delays, travel time to and from the airport or train station, layovers, etc.  It becomes a highly abused element of PS metrics.  What I prefer to do is create a target number of billable or productive hours per quarter.  Travel time, sick/holiday time, training, administration, etc. are all considered when creating your target hours.

You mention that your team does a lot of pre-sales work. I don’t
agree that this can’t be tracked. I track pre-sales time by client so
that I can provide input to total cost of sales. Sales clients are a
special category of client that we obviously don’t bill.

Barb T.

I believe that Carole M. has ‘hit the nail on the head’ and agree whole heartedly with her comments and suggestions.

Roy S.

Hello,
No easy or right answer.  The appropriateness of the response may also depend on the type of worker, type of service, industry culture, etc. so let me first explain my context.  My project teams have consisted of salaried (6 figures + 10 to 20% bonus), highly professional management consultants with specialties in Order to Pay and ERP system implementations.  The products have been SaaS Order to Pay or ERP type implementations for Fortune 500 companies. 

Within that context travel time is not something I have focused on; nor have I billed customers for it; nor does it count toward utilization.  The exception is time spent on client billable activities while in transit.  With this model the worker is incentivized to book all customer hours worked to hit or exceed their utilization targets.  The manager above them who owns project P&L is managing these resources to make sure they are working efficiently and hours booked seem reasonable.  If the project is fixed fee they will take a hit on their goals if the hours booked goes over.  Even if the project is variable they would take a hit for exceeding the budget goal unless they did a change order to justify the amount over original budget.  Financially, the firm benefits because the workers are incentivized to book all billable hours.

A problem is that the manager may pressure the workers to book less hours.  This is against firm policy but is a real issue that must be managed.

Sales support is another balancing item.  If the worker’s goals are 80% utilization and $1,000,000.00 supported sales closed then they will manage their activities throughout the year to hit both goals.  I do not count sales support activities towards utilization.  For controls the lead sales person decides who gets to count the $1MM sale in their goals depending on whether the support was material.  Sales is generally liberal in giving credit but that’s generally works out OK.

Hope this helps.

Scott S.

First, make all requests for sales support come through you or some responsible party so that sales is using your staff to close prospects, not to chase suspects. Don’t do projects that require 12 hours of travel for one day billing or tell the client that they are going to be billed for half the travel time if they are only going to commit to one day of consulting.
Have regular reviews of timesheets with the people filling out the timesheets.  This will send the message that individuals are accountable for how they spend their time.  You can also require pre-approval for any non-billable time. 

If the ratios of billable to non-billable time is not what you need, you have to ask yourself if you are overstaffed.  Establish targets for billable time and reward those who exceed that time.

Mike H

Director, Professional Services

Thanks to everyone for the responses! I guess I shouldn’t have used the travel time example, given the other recent travel-related posting. Just to expand for future forum browsers. We are the pre-sales and services team, dealing with roughly 1,500 prospects/clients per year. Technically, this time is trackable by client if we could automate some things but we use a really weak CRM tool so connecting it to our PSA (OpenAir) tool isn’t feasible.

My concerns in general were around time and metric validity and abuses. I feel that in general my team can do a better job producitivity-wise, we don’t get as much done as I’d like and most don’t have a PS view of things (most are ex-developers as I am and ex-customer support people). My concern is that if I start to reward/punish based on metrics (we do 99% fixed-bid, so we need to limit overhead time), I’m simply shifting that time to being logged under a different task where I have no way to validate the time. So I’m not fixing the problem in that case, just “fixing” my metrics, if that makes sense. I think Carole M.  really turned on the light-bulb for me, I need to do a better job of ingraining some of these ideas with the team.

And target utilization, don’t get me started with questions there!

Again, thanks for the feedback.

Matt H.