Professional Services Metrics: Utilisation, Realisation & Project Margin

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn capacity into available hours, calculate each consultant's utilisation, pool it by role and the whole firm, and measure the gap against the role targets in hours.
• Look up each consultant's standard rate on the rate card, value the billable hours at standard, work out the blended rate and the margin the firm would earn if every hour were billed at standard.
• Measure how much of the standard value each engagement actually billed and collected, find the firm's realisation and flag the engagements below the review threshold.
• Count fee earners, calculate the leverage ratio and revenue per head for each practice, derive profit per partner and prove it equals margin × productivity × leverage.
• Compare a consulting project's budget with what has been spent, earn the budget by % complete, read a fee index per phase and forecast the final fees.
• Calculate revenue for time & materials and fixed-fee engagements with one IF, compare margins by contract type and find the real hourly rate the fixed-fee work earned.
• Forecast six months of demand from booked work and a weighted pipeline, compare it with capacity, size the bench in hours and people, and chart demand against capacity.
• Build next year's rate card from cost: billable hours from target utilisation, cost per billable hour, the rate for a target margin, a list rate grossed up for realisation, and the margin a proposal can expect.