Who Is Free Next Week? Resourcing a Firm Without Guesswork
Who is free next week is the hardest question in a professional firm and the one most often answered by asking around. Capacity as a number rather than an impression, why utilisation targets create the wrong behaviour, and how to see an overload before it becomes a missed deadline.
A partner wins a new engagement on Thursday and needs to know whether the firm can staff it starting Monday. The answer comes from walking down the corridor asking three people whether they are busy, all of whom say yes, because everybody is always busy. The work is accepted anyway, and it is absorbed — by whoever is least able to say no.
This is the resourcing problem in every firm under about eighty people, and it is not solved by a scheduling tool. It is solved by having any shared view of committed effort at all, which most firms genuinely do not have.
Capacity is what is left, not what exists
A firm with twelve professionals does not have twelve people of capacity. It has whatever remains after committed engagement work, leave, administration, business development and the training that keeps everyone qualified — and the residual is far smaller than headcount suggests.
One consultant, one month
Illustrative. Ask this person whether they can take on a new engagement and they will say they are busy, which is accurate but unquantified. The one-day figure supports a decision — delay the start, resource it differently, or accept that something else slips — and "I am busy" supports none.
"I am busy" is accurate and useless. One available day is a number a partner can plan around — and the difference is simply whether committed effort is written down anywhere shared.
The three things that must be visible
| What | Where it lives in most firms | Consequence |
|---|---|---|
| Who is assigned to what, and roughly how much | The partner's head, per engagement | No aggregate view — three partners each think they have the same person |
| Who is on leave when | Approved somewhere, visible nowhere | An engagement staffed on somebody who is away for the delivery week |
| What is coming, not just what is running | The proposal pipeline, seen only by partners | Capacity committed to work that has not been won, or none held for work that has |
The second is the cheapest to fix and produces immediate value. Approved leave that nobody consults during resourcing is the most common single cause of a delivery crisis in a small firm, and it is entirely avoidable — the information already exists and has simply never been put next to the assignments.
Utilisation targets and what they actually cause
Most firms manage capacity through a utilisation target — a percentage of available hours that should be chargeable. It is a reasonable instrument and it produces two well-documented distortions worth naming before you adopt one.
What a utilisation target intends
- Chargeable effort is prioritised
- Idle capacity becomes visible
- Resourcing decisions have a shared measure
- The firm knows its cost of unbilled time
What it also produces
- Time recorded to whichever engagement has budget left
- Reluctance to help colleagues, since it is not chargeable
- Business development and training quietly deprioritised
- High utilisation on unprofitable work looking like success
The last point is the important one. Utilisation measures whether people are busy; realisation measures whether being busy earned anything. A firm at 85% utilisation and 60% realisation is working extremely hard on work it is not being paid for — and the utilisation figure alone reads as excellent. Track both or neither.
A weekly resourcing meeting beats any tool
Firms under fifty people rarely need resourcing software. They need thirty minutes on the same day each week where the same four questions get asked with the same information in front of everybody.
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What is landing in the next two weeks?
Engagements starting, deliverables due, deadlines. Two weeks is the horizon where change is still possible; four weeks is planning and one week is crisis management.
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Who is away?
Approved leave read out loud. This single item prevents most delivery surprises and takes ninety seconds.
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Where is the overload?
Named person, named week. Then decide — move the work, move the deadline, or accept it explicitly. Accepting it explicitly is a legitimate answer; discovering it is not.
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What did we win or lose since last week?
Pipeline changes are resourcing changes. A proposal that converted is capacity committed as surely as an engagement already running.
What we do and do not do
What AWRA OpsHub does today
- Tasks and engagements with assignees, so who is on what is recorded rather than remembered.
- Recorded time per person per engagement, which is what makes utilisation and realisation computable.
- Leave requests, approvals and balances, so absence is a record rather than an assumption.
- Engagement budgets in hours or value, so committed effort has a size.
- Saved task views and reporting, so a per-person workload list can be produced and scheduled.
- Milestones and due dates, so what is landing when is visible.
What it does not do
- No resource scheduling board. There is no capacity planner, no allocation grid and nothing showing a person's committed hours per future week.
- No over-allocation warning. Nothing tells you the same person is assigned to three engagements in the same week.
- No skills or grade matrix. Matching a person to work by qualification is your knowledge.
- No forecasting from the pipeline. Unwon work does not consume capacity anywhere in the system.
This is the least-covered area in this article's subject matter and it would be dishonest to present it otherwise. What exists is the raw material — assignments, recorded time, leave, budgets — from which a weekly resourcing conversation can be run properly. The forward-looking capacity view is a spreadsheet or a whiteboard in most firms of this size, and that is a reasonable answer under fifty people.
Our take
Hold a thirty-minute resourcing meeting on the same day every week with assignments, leave and the pipeline in front of you. Track realisation alongside utilisation or you will optimise for being busy on unprofitable work. And expect the forward capacity view to be a spreadsheet — under fifty people that is genuinely fine, provided somebody maintains it and everybody reads the same one.
See task and engagement management
Assignments recorded per engagement, time per person, leave balances and approvals, budgets in hours and saved views you can schedule.
Explore task managementFrequently asked questions
Is there a resource scheduling board?
No — there is no capacity planner, no allocation grid, no view of a person's committed hours per future week and no over-allocation warning. What exists is the material a resourcing conversation needs: who is assigned to what, recorded time, approved leave and engagement budgets. Under about fifty people, a weekly meeting with a maintained spreadsheet outperforms most scheduling software anyway; above that, weigh a dedicated tool.
What is the difference between utilisation and realisation?
Utilisation is the share of available hours that was chargeable — whether people were busy. Realisation is the share of that chargeable value actually invoiced and collected — whether being busy earned anything. A firm at 85% utilisation and 60% realisation is working very hard on work it is not being paid for, and the utilisation figure alone reads as a success story. Track both or neither.
How far ahead should we plan resourcing?
Two weeks as the working horizon, reviewed weekly. Four weeks out, too much changes for the detail to survive; one week out, an overload is a crisis rather than a decision. The two-week view is where you can still move work, move a deadline, or explicitly accept the overload — and explicitly accepting it is a legitimate outcome, while discovering it on the day is not.
Why do our engagements always end up staffed on the same people?
Because absorption is invisible. Without a shared view of committed effort, work goes to whoever is least able to refuse it, and their unavailability never becomes a fact anybody can see. Writing down assignments and reading approved leave aloud in a weekly meeting fixes most of it — not because it constrains anyone, but because it makes the answer "she has one day free this month" instead of "she is busy".
Does leave feed into resourcing automatically?
Leave requests, approvals and balances are recorded, but nothing surfaces them against engagement assignments — there is no combined view. Reading approved leave for the next two weeks aloud in the weekly resourcing meeting takes ninety seconds and prevents the most common delivery surprise in a small firm, which is an engagement staffed on someone who is away during the delivery week.
