Technician Utilization Rate: Plan Productive Hours

Keep Paid Hours Out of the Capacity Column

The MSP model starts with 2,080 paid hours a year. It reduces that to 1,660 available hours after time off and its admin allowance. Service staff are then planned at 70% of those available hours.

Keep the stages separate in your own records. If you have already removed leave when calculating availability, don't subtract it again from productive capacity. If your logged categories overlap with the model's admin allowance, resolve that overlap before applying another deduction.

The difference isn't a verdict on how hard somebody works. It's the definition of the hours you put into the plan. I'd give the spreadsheet fewer hours before giving the team another lecture.

Productive Does Not Mean Separately Billed

A technician can deliver work covered by a recurring managed-service agreement. The client has paid for the agreed service through that fee. Whether the technician raises another invoice is a different question from whether the time was spent delivering it.

Name the work categories your capacity report counts. Match those categories to the work you put in the workload forecast. A report that counts only hourly invoices won't answer a question about all the service work under recurring agreements.

I don't buy a utilization report whose heading leaves its denominator unexplained. The denominator is the hours you divide by: available time here. Labeling it plainly is more useful than giving the report another acronym.

Use the Figure Against the Work You Actually Have

The model's US example has 700 seats. At its well-run assumption of 0.5 tickets per seat a month, ticket work plus residual alert work totals about 309.8 hours a month. The model puts a typical MSP at 1.0 to 1.4 tickets per seat; measure your own workload rather than treating the well-run rate as a default.

For that example workload, 309.8 ÷ 96.83 is about 3.20 full-time equivalents, or FTE. An FTE is a full-time amount of work, not a fraction of an employee you can recruit. The model staffs that pool as four whole people.

That calculation sizes the stated workload under the stated assumptions. It doesn't establish that your desk needs four people. Start with your ticket labor and alert work, check what is included, and use the productive hours your team can support.

The gap between modeled workload and staffed capacity is room in the plan. It isn't automatically a spare project engineer. The model puts project and onboarding work with project engineers, so keep those assignments visible when you compare demand with the desk's capacity.

Use a Different Assumption for Project Engineers

The project-engineer assumption is 85% of available hours. On the same 1,660-hour basis, that is 1,660 × 0.85 = 1,411 productive hours a year, or 117.58 a month. The model treats project engineers as dedicated resources without escalation duty.

If your project engineers also take desk escalations, record that work before using the dedicated-role assumption. Assign the time to the work it actually served. Otherwise the capacity plan can promise the same person's hours to both teams.

Keep unpaid onboarding in the project workload. The lack of a separate fee doesn't make its hours available for another project. Check the workload definition before asking anybody to raise a utilization target.

Put the Same Hours Into Your Cost Calculation

Burdened pay means salary plus the employer's modeled employment costs. For a US Tier 1 technician, the model uses a $50,000 salary and a 1.25 burden multiplier. That gives $50,000 × 1.25 = $62,500 a year.

Use the service-role productive hours with that cost: $62,500 ÷ 1,162 = about $53.79 per productive labor hour. This is labor only, before adding the other costs required for the service. Using paid hours instead would calculate a different cost basis.

Replace the inputs with your own supported costs and capacity when making a business decision. Keep the annual cost matched to annual productive hours. A monthly workload forecast needs the corresponding monthly hours, not an annual number copied into the next column.

Make the Monday Board Test Concrete

My test is: what does this do to the board on Monday morning? It should tell the service lead what work fits, what needs another owner, and which capacity assumption needs checking. A percentage with no connection to the assigned work doesn't answer that test.

• The finance owner confirms paid hours and burdened employment costs for the period.
• The service lead checks availability deductions and removes overlapping categories.
• The dispatch owner compares the forecast ticket and alert workload with the capacity assigned to it.
• The project lead accounts for project work, onboarding, and any time committed to escalations.
• The service lead reviews logged delivery time against the plan and explains the difference before changing staffing.

A low reported percentage is a question to investigate, not proof of overstaffing. A high one also needs its work categories and available-hour basis checked. Look at workload, role assignments, and the time records before deciding what the number means.

Keep 70% for service staff and 85% for dedicated project engineers labeled as model assumptions. Use actual evidence to judge their fit for your operation. The decision is how much work the team can deliver, including work covered by recurring fees.