Utilisation report
A utilisation report presents hours logged over a period and how they were distributed, usually across projects, departments and time. Its job is to make the shape of a period readable, not to produce one headline figure for somebody to react to.
A report built around a single percentage invites a single reaction. Up is good, down is bad, and nobody asks what moved.
The useful version carries the breakdown beside the total. Which projects absorbed the hours. Which departments. How the total moved week on week, and how much of the period's timesheets had actually been submitted when the report ran.
That last item is the one most often missing, and it changes everything. A utilisation figure built on half-submitted sheets is not low. It is incomplete, and those are different problems with opposite responses.
Timing and audience matter too. A report that lands after the period it describes has already been staffed is a record. The same report a week in, seen by whoever makes the staffing calls, changes something. Send the second kind.
Keep the format still. A report whose shape changes every month cannot be compared with the last one, so the trend, which is the most useful thing in it, never accumulates. Fix the layout early and let the numbers be the part that moves.
Where this shows up in PeopleMuster
PeopleMuster reports total hours, utilisation, average daily hours and a weekly trend, broken down by project, by department and by sheet status, and can post the report to Slack.
Questions people ask
What should a utilisation report include?
The total, the breakdown by project and department, the trend, and how complete the underlying timesheets were. The last one decides how much weight the rest can carry.
Why break hours down by sheet status?
Because it separates a genuinely light period from an unsubmitted one. Without it, the report cannot tell you whether the number is bad news or simply early.
Who should receive a utilisation report?
Whoever staffs work, while the period can still be changed. A report arriving after the decisions is a record of what happened, not an input to anything.