Are we short of engineers or not?
The service desk feels overloaded. Tickets are ageing, engineers are complaining, and the operations director wants to hire. The managing director asks whether the team is actually fully used, or whether time is going somewhere unproductive. Nobody can answer with figures.
The PSA shows hours logged, but some engineers log everything and some log only billable work. Project engineers log to projects, service desk engineers to tickets, and nobody logs the hour spent in the morning backup check or the afternoon fighting the RMM. Holidays and training are in a separate HR system.
Why utilisation is hard to see
Utilisation is logged time divided by available time, split by the kind of work. Both halves of that sum are usually unreliable at an MSP.
- Available hours are not in the PSA: holiday, sickness and training live elsewhere.
- Work types are inconsistent between engineers.
- Internal work (monitoring checks, documentation, tool upkeep) is rarely logged.
- Onboarding and project time is mixed with managed support.
- Reports show totals, not trends or comparisons between engineers.
Different roles also have different healthy levels. A service desk engineer spending most of the day on tickets is doing their job; a senior engineer doing the same may be a sign that projects and design work are being crowded out. A single utilisation figure for everyone hides that.
What guessing costs
| Blind spot | Effect |
|---|---|
| Real capacity unknown | Hiring too early or too late |
| Internal work invisible | Tool upkeep and checks eat time nobody plans for |
| Project time under-recorded | Projects look more profitable than they are |
| Uneven load between engineers | Burnout for some, spare capacity in others |
| No trend | Problems seen only when people leave |
Utilisation targets are a management choice, and pushing them too high has its own costs. The reporting shows reality so the choice is informed.
Utilisation reporting we build
- Time entries pulled nightly from your PSA, by engineer, work type, client and ticket or project.
- Available hours per engineer from your rota, HR or holiday system (such as BreatheHR or a shared calendar), including part-time patterns.
- A small set of standard work types agreed with the team (managed support, billable project, onboarding, internal, training), mapped from your existing PSA work types.
- Weekly utilisation per engineer and team, split by work type, with trends over months.
- Gaps shown clearly: available hours with no time logged, so missing time entries become visible rather than hidden.
- A capacity view for the coming weeks, combining booked project work, holiday and typical support load.
The operations meeting, with figures
The operations director opens a weekly view. It shows the service desk logging most of its available time to managed support, with a noticeable chunk to internal work that nobody had counted: the daily backup and alert checks. It shows one senior engineer spending most of their time on low-level tickets because they are the only one who knows a particular client. It shows project engineers with gaps of unlogged time, which turns out to be travel.
The hiring question becomes specific: the service desk is genuinely full, but automating the morning checks and cross-training on that client would free real time. The decision might still be to hire, but it is made on evidence.
Month by month, the trend shows whether changes are working: whether internal work falls after the checks are automated, whether project time estimates are getting closer to reality.
The per-client split is useful beyond staffing. When the same view shows that one client absorbs a disproportionate share of a senior engineer's week, the account manager has the start of a renewal or rescoping conversation. When onboarding time for new clients keeps running over the plan, the onboarding fee or template can be revisited. Both are decisions the directors make, but they start from the same figures the operations team uses.
Signs you need utilisation reporting
- Hiring decisions are made on how busy the desk feels.
- Engineers log time inconsistently.
- Internal work is never measured.
- Holiday and training are not in the same place as time entries.
- You cannot compare load between engineers.