Bench Time

A consultant finishes a client engagement on Friday and has no new assignment until two weeks later, and those available hours are bench time under a common staffing definition. The firm still pays the consultant while looking for appropriate work.

Bench time is not the same as every nonbillable hour, because people may work on internal projects, sales proposals, management or training while allocated to a job, and Resource Planner distinguishes no useful work from internal activity during an unassigned period, so decide how to label each in reports. Deltek describes resource utilisation as the share of available time spent on billable or productive tasks.

Bench time is a related capacity measure, but a low utilisation rate cannot by itself reveal whether someone is unassigned, doing essential internal work or on leave. Define available hours, exclude vacation and holidays if the goal is staffing capacity, and include or exclude training consistently, since a denominator that changes across teams makes the percentage misleading.

An illustrative bench share divides unassigned available hours by total available hours for the same group and period. If a team has 240 bench hours out of 1,600 available hours, the share is 15%, but that says nothing alone about future demand or skills fit.

Short gaps between projects are normal because a worker may need handover, rest or preparation before joining another client, and forcing every hour onto a project can lead to poor matches and rework. A long bench period has costs, because the firm pays salary and overhead without matching client revenue and skills can go unused.

Track duration per person as well as the team's average, since a few long gaps can be hidden inside a reasonable overall percentage. Reasons differ: sales may not have enough confirmed work, a project may be delayed, or the available people may lack the skills required, and each needs a different response, from improving pipeline visibility to training or rescheduling.

Use confirmed demand separately from hoped-for pipeline, so a proposal that might close next month is not treated as a signed assignment today, and give managers probabilities and start-date assumptions rather than one optimistic number. Training can make bench time valuable when matched to likely needs, such as a relevant certification or shadowing plan, but do not invent internal tasks simply to make the dashboard look busy.

The workload of other staff matters too, because a high bench share alongside overtime in another team may point to a skills mismatch or poor allocation, and project margins do not improve automatically when bench time falls if a poorly suited consultant creates rework or disappoints a client. A low bench share can also be risky, since if everyone is fully booked there is little capacity for a new customer, illness or urgent change, so plan a buffer that fits the sales cycle and the firm's ability to hire.

Forecast by role and skill with a forward schedule that shows planned starts and end dates, because the business may have designers available while needing engineers next quarter. Do not turn the measure into a blunt individual target, since staff cannot always control sales, scheduling or a customer delay, and being between projects should not be framed as a personal failure; for owners, bench time is the space between paid capacity and confirmed client demand.