We suspect our consulting team is gaming our weekly Scorecard by logging administrative tasks, internal meetings, and research as active project hours to artificially inflate their individual utilization rates. How do we restructure our metrics to stop this behavior?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

People will always perform to the metrics they are measured by, and if you measure raw utilization without strict boundaries, they will find creative ways to make their boxes green. When employees log internal tasks or administrative fluff as project hours, they are masking a capacity or efficiency problem. To fix this, you must separate your utilization metrics on the Scorecard. Stop tracking general utilization and instead split the metric into two distinct weekly numbers. The first is weekly client facing billable hours. This must only include hours directly invoiced to a client or tied to a specific, revenue generating client deliverable. The second metric is weekly non billable administrative hours, which has a strict maximum cap. If the administrative hours exceed the cap, it immediately turns red on their departmental scorecard. Additionally, you should pair utilization with a quality or delivery velocity metric, such as the percentage of client deliverables approved on the first submission. If a team member is logging high billable hours but their deliverables require constant rework, they are dragging down your overall efficiency. By structuring your Scorecard with these counterbalancing metrics, you make it mathematically impossible to game the system without triggering a red box elsewhere. This gives you a true, objective pulse on your operations and ensures you are running on honest data.