The utilization report that flatters everyone and helps no one
Every engineer's utilization report reads somewhere between 82 and 88 percent, week after week, month after month. Real utilization moves with real workload, and workload is never this consistent, so a flat number usually means the numbers are being managed to look right. Nobody is lying on purpose. People round their own time toward a figure that feels safe to report, and after enough weeks the habit becomes invisible even to the person doing it.
A metric that never surprises you has usually stopped measuring anything. Treat a suspiciously flat number as a question worth asking, not a result worth celebrating.
The prompt:
You are building a read on whether your utilization numbers reflect real work.
Context: [six months of utilization reports across your team, weekly or monthly, by engineer]
Build:
Anyone whose utilization has stayed suspiciously flat regardless of ticket volume, flagged
What that might indicate: inaccurate logging, or work being quietly absorbed without being tracked