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P2 - I disagree. Your impact to the firm or clients doesn’t always align with utilization. Someone doing PMO or staff aug and at 120% utilization won’t have the same impact as someone doing a more strategic engagement, but may have lower utilization as the partners haven’t sold as much and in general they are shorter engagements and you’d do a good bunch of them a year. The latter would also have higher margins and bring in more $$ and has smarter people. They’d all leave if there’s a meaningless metric which results in no bonus.
OP, you have to remove your romantic notion of consulting from the equation and look at this realistically. “Smarter people do shorter duration projects and bring in more money than staff aug projects”. Bullshit. At the end of the year, there is a very clear amount of money that you bring in, and a very clear amount of money that you cost the firm to employ. The delta is your profitability, and that is what matters.
I’ll trade you 3 “smart people who are looking to be staffed on strategic projects” for one person who is willing to roll up his/her sleeves and deliver to the firm’s bottom line. Those are the people who are bringing in the money that keeps the lights on while we flirt with “strategic projects”. You can hate it all you want, but those are the economics that drive the mid-tier firms.
You are more than welcome to chase the projects that are purely of interest to you. But you can’t be upset when someone who worked their ass off on a tech delivery project that was boring as hell but kept them at 120% out performs you while you chase those sexy projects and write proposals.
I’m not trying to tell you it’s right or wrong. I’m just telling you how it is. Take it or leave it.
It seems selective though. Someone in my practice got promoted to Manager with a very low utilization. It does not appear to be a consistent standard.
Were they involved in sales. A partner may have held them to drive proposals that eventually sold.
Promotions and ratings are highly political. Utilization is one metric that leadership can use/isolate in order to justify a decision that sometimes has already been made. There are various reasons someone might not have high utilization - plenty of firm initiatives that are just as if not more time consuming and demand someone's full attention, projects that get pushed and therefore can't get billed and sometimes there is work that doesn't sell which leaves people hanging
We don't get a bonus here anyway (not really at least, it exists but is miniscule) so no real bonus to take away but it does affect raise and promotion chance
Right on,op. It discourages people from doing bd.
P2 our targets are not low. And the only way to hit them is by being on a long term staff aug.
Sm1 I think they were, but most of the Partners proposals did not sell. That partner is known for having low sales.
Affects our bonus, but can be completely offset by contributing to the business while on bench - crafting proposals, solutions, internal teaching, events, operations.
It should affect your bonus. You are being rewarded for how useful you are to projects and clients. And our utilization targets are low to start with.
P1 - the new policy (atleast in FS) is that if you don’t hit the utilization metric you get NO bonus. Doesn’t matter if you sold millions or anything else. So different to past years. (I had low utilization but was promoted and got a 1 rating due to BD work I had done. But the point this year is that won’t happen. If you don’t hit the metric - no bonus. No exceptions. It’s to force people to bill actual time etc which is difficult to do with some partners putting pressure not to bill actuals as they look bad when they don’t stay on budget.
If I’ve heard correct the leading strategy houses don’t have utilization as a metric. Is that correct? Trying to get sense of who uses it. I know enough smart people who are plannig to get he he’ll out of here due to stupid things like this brought on by the new FS leadership.
OP, None of this is new. Util has always impacted your bonus, they just never put it on paper. I’ve been here for 6 years and can speak to this with experience.
Again, our targets are very low. If you can’t find a way to add “impact” while hitting a low util base line, then you need to re-evaluate how you are aligned to our firm.
Comparing our work to the strat firms is comparing apples to oranges. All of the firms at our level use util as a metric, whether explicitly or otherwise.
Utilization is important, so if u r low u better have a good story to tell. And if it is good, then u can do better than a high utilization person. Problem is quantifying the “good story”.
what’s your target utilization percentage?
For SAs where I’m aligned - 86%, so if you’re in a group with long term projects but also long lead cycles, hitting the bench can be a death sentence
P2 what practice are you? AML?
Forensics.
And to be clear, I’m not saying that you have I have amazing util to get a good bonus. Adding value elsewhere is important. But you just can’t be upset when the people who are doing the dirty work get a bonus after being assigned to a grind of a project if you aren’t even hitting you base level metrics.
I am not trying to be a dick. Just telling you how I’ve seen it after 6 years here