| Topic Name: |
Billable hours quotas |
| Message Name: |
Oh boy |
| Date Posted: |
01/15/2002 |
| In Reply To: |
I work at a Management Consulting firm which uses a 2000 billable hour per annum benchmark to peg bonus levels for all staff members below the rank of director (and implicitly to sow nervousness amongst the ranks).
I've heard of other firms which expect 1600 or so from their consultants, but am hoping to get my hands on a few more examples.
I'm interested in this as a reflection of how firms balance a desire to engender development of intellectual capital with a need to book revenue. |
| Message: |
Billable hours are definitely a unique characteristic of consulting jobs. Imagine how much easier life would be if you only had to punch a time card once a week for how many hours you worked rather than having to fill out and account for every half hour of your work week.
I'm in engineering consulting. I don't know about you but in any given week, I could be charging billable hours to 9 or 10 different projects.
In the first firm I worked for in engineering consulting, they required at least 1800 billable hours per year in order to record a year's service with that organization, and they also wanted to see you maintain at least 80% billable hours each week. My current company really pushes at least the 80% billable rate but haven't pushed any overall billable hour goals.
I've never worked for a business/management/strat consulting firm before (although I'd like to) so I don't know how they structure their project teams and who is responsible for what.
If you're responsible for proposal writing, full project management and marketing then you're billable hours are going to be restricted unless you work more hours overall. Then of course there are always those little miscellaneous admin things that pop up. However, if you have a prject leader who handles the project management and scheduling, you have the partners and senior consultants doing all the proposal writing and marketing, and you're just given direction on what to do on a given project, then your billable rate should be up around 100% or more (assuming your rates are based on 40-hour work weeks).
I don't know about any of you, but I think the urgency to bill hours is really distracting at times. Although I don't particularly like my firm, one thing I do like is the fact that they want me to just make sure I get at least 32 hours billed in a week and to produce quality work. Of course I could never get away with a 40 hour work week but that's another discussion.
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