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Literally every company I’ve ever worked for... gotta move on from Uncle D!
Utilization is calculated off a 40 hour work week. 40*52*utilization target. If your target is 90% and you bill 45 hours a week then you technically only need to work 42 weeks of the year. That leaves 10 weeks for PTO, firm holidays and a little bit of bench time.
My target util is 95%, so I have 5 weeks where I can be not billing assuming 45 (most of my projects have billed 42). 2.4 of those weeks are firm holidays. I now have 2.6 weeks to take 22 days of PTO AND do proposal work AND find a new project AND do training/learning/helping initiatives in person.
Rising Star
PTO doesn’t impact chargeability at ACN
Pro
OP - I hated how PTO impacts utilization at Deloitte. The 80 or 90% utilization basically requires 80%*45*52 weeks. Any time off (PTO or sick) counts against utilization! What crap! On top of that Deloitte was the only firm I know of that calculates workweeks as 45 hours. In the end the house always wins. My experience at Accenture was different where PTO did not impact utilization. The cruel Deloitte metric basically ensures that practitioners don’t take PTO, yet leadership gives such a BS soap opera about work life balance and mental health awareness for taking time off... total frauds!!!
D10, how you get 5 days for 8 weeks working?
At EY it’s factored out of your effective utilization which is used for performance review
Chief
It's even worse on the federal side at Deloitte where you are often capped at charging 40 hours per week.
If you've got a, say, 90% util target and have two weeks of bench or training time during the year while on capped projects the rest of the time, unless you can find a unicorn billable FI, you're now limited to taking no more than 6 days of PTO.
Make that three weeks of bench/training time and you can only take a whopping 1 day of PTO unless you're on a project where you can flex your hours.
It was a huge, huge griping point while I was at D on the fed side from 2013-2015 and was the single biggest factor that led me to jump ship.
Chief
During my 3 years there, I hit my util target once. I was >10% off my first year and got dinged for it, was a couple % above it year two, then missed it by 1% year three.
KPMG. For advisory, It’s factored out of your Advisory Adjusted Utilization, which is used for performance metrics.
We don't count PTO against utilization. In fact, most projects I've been on encourage you to take PTO to avoid burnout.
PTO hours come out of denominator so vacation doesn’t hurt utilization. Actually helps the figure if you’re not currently billing.
Unless of course if you a Partner. In which case you get infinite/no PTO.
Chief
There may be one or two other firms that do it, but for the most part that is a uniquely Deloitte thing OP
What happens when you take PTO? You get dinged for it?
Chief
Hmm, I wonder if that's changed since my time at D or if it tends to vary by service line? I was SI and TSA in my time there from 2013-2015 and all seven of my projects were capped at 40 per week. I know the last one I was on was T&M, but not sure what the others were.
We technically get dinged too since those hours are part of our available working hours - thus taking PTO lowers utilization
Rising Star
If you’re arguing the utilization targets are too high, valid argument to have.
Otherwise it’s a red herring IMO. Deloitte could say OK we now adjusted the policy do PTO time is counted as billable hours, and here’s your new utilization targets that are the same number of billable hours higher.
If they did that, it would also mean that someone with low utilization would not have as many options to raise low utilization. They could take PTO to raise it given the system I described, but that would already be built into the model.
The util targets are how the firm breaks down the revenue they need to meet their forecast to a practitioner level. If you added non-revenue PTO to the model, you’d need higher utilization targets to still make the same revenue numbers.
Op, I got what your saying. In fact SM1 is also right.
What D really wants to say is give x number of hours. It doesn’t matter rest what you do. But they also comes behind PTO if you take more than 3 weeks at a stretch.
Op one your correct. Why to promote PTO when D is not giving that.
SM1, the system you are talking about should be nice to have. Suppose if I work last year like a dog didn’t get chance to take PTO then I can take this year without worrying about my utilization because it will adjust.
You can remove a sense and other leaves from there
Accenture
D stance: we mask flexible work hours under the guise of PTO. You can take time off, but you are expected to make that time up on another day to keep your utilization. There is no true time off. In fact, be sure to work 45 billable hours a week to have enough buffer of extra work time built up as make up hours for vacation.
To answer your original q op, the pto does not impact utilization (it gets adjusted) at KPMG. The adjusted utilization was what year end evaluations were performed on. Targets did NOT increase when this change was made.
Accenture
Chief
This is not true people jeez. You have a chargeable hours target to hit. I believe it’s 1880 for consultant level employees and varies from there. You can take all the PTO you want - the numerator and denominator stay the same. 1880/2080 or whatever your target is (based on level).
Chief
"There's not a good solution," yet almost every other large consulting has found a good solution 🤷♀️ but yes, of course bench time should drop your chargeability - the difference being that an employee-friendly firm should encourage their employees to take PTO, while the same is generally not true of being on the bench
PA Consulting did. I think it is common amongst European
firms.
at PwC only holiday hours don’t count against utilization but PTO does
Nope it is that way every where if you have a target goal to meet