bgirl - 12:24 am on Mar 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

From a designer's point of view...

#1 - (obviously) You have to have the sales to keep them busy. #2 - Make sure your really analyzing production hours... not time they spend answering the phone and providing tech support. Perhaps someone else needs to be responsible for tech support issues

Freeing up admin time may or may not make someone more productive... Look at the "softer" issues like time of day worked, mood, stress, etc. (comfortable cows make more milk...). The question here is "now you have all this time, why aren't you more productive?" For myself, I find that I have about 4 hours of really productive/creative time each day. The rest is busywork/easy brain stuff (some billable, some not). How do I guage that? Just my experience. Your mileage may vary.

#3 - Hiring a project manager to interface with the client may be the smart approach... if the pm can free up 25 to 33% of the designer/developers time they can produce more and may pay for the pm's salary.

There are some admin issues a designer/developer can't shove off entirely onto a pm, specifically the stuff everone hates to do like keep accruate time records (maybe some software for this?), keep notes on status of project, etc. It's admin, but it's billable admin. One company I worked for would give the designers $1 each time they handed in their time cards.

Then there's communication... adding one more layer of communication between client and desr/devr (the pm) can complicate things. It should be a person who really understands what is going on and has been in the trenches.

Anybody else could muck it up.

It also depends on how well your desrs/devrs communicate with clients some do well, others should remain in their cubes, only brought out for a lineup.

#4 - 60% to 70% is probably a good target once #1 through #3 are in place.

I guess. Sounds like you have a pretty good reason for being in a lower target (trades). Also a company developing a product could have lower numbers too. No absolutes. It's good to have a goal to strive for, but make sure it's the right goal.

A tougher question to quantify is "are you getting the projects you want?"