How Smart Professional Services Leaders Are Taking Utilization Analysis to the Next Level

If you lead a professional services organization, you’ve likely heard it before: “Our utilization needs to improve.” 

You may have dashboards tracking the basics, maybe even some reporting that lets you slice performance by team, project, or person. But if you’re being honest, you’re probably still struggling to answer three deceptively simple questions:

1. Why was our utilization what it was?
   
2. What will it be next month?
   
3. What can we do now to improve it?

Many traditional business intelligence (BI) tools stop short of answering these decisively. They show what happened, but not why, not what’s next — and certainly not what to do. This is where organizations striving for the next level of data maturity can make a transformational leap.

So what does that next level look like? 

The best way to understand it is to look at a real-world example. At Kantata, we recently developed a dashboard that helps organizations move beyond rearview reporting and towards proactive, AI-powered, action-guiding intelligence that supports data-driven leadership.

The Problem: Too Many Leaders are Stuck in Rearview Mode

Most services dashboards are stuck in the first two rungs of BI maturity:

• Descriptive: “What happened?”
• Diagnostic: “Why did it happen?”

These capabilities are valuable, but they are no longer enough. As organizations grow, leaders need tools that also deliver BI that is:

• Predictive: “What will happen?”
• Prescriptive: “What should I do?”

Without these, you’re left reacting to the past instead of actively shaping the future. You risk missing important early signals of underperformance, leaving you without the foresight to adjust plans and avoid missed targets.

The Way Forward: 4 Steps to Utilization Optimization

If you want to solve the utilization puzzle, your systems need to guide you through a four-step journey:

Step 1: What Happened?
Track actual vs. forecasted utilization with clear variance views. Drill down by user or project to quickly pinpoint the biggest deltas.

Step 2: Why Did It Happen?
Identify the people and projects driving performance gaps. Maybe a critical consultant logged zero hours on a high-impact project while racking up admin time. Maybe a key initiative stalled. No matter the issue, your systems should surface these insights without requiring manual detective work.

Step 3: What Will Happen?
Use AI-driven machine learning and regression analysis to forecast future utilization more accurately than gut feel or spreadsheets. At Kantata, we’ve introduced this capability to help organizations automatically adjust forecasts based on historical trends and known biases to deliver dramatically improved accuracy. This isn’t just automation for automation’s sake; it’s optimization powered by AI, giving leaders predictive insights that proactively surface before you even know to ask the question.

Step 4: What Should I Do?
Here’s where real impact happens: prescriptive recommendations. They optimize your path forward by recommending the specific actions you can take right now. Kantata’s approach reflects our vision that insights should find you, rather than requiring you to hunt for answers across disconnected reports. Those answers might include:

• Reassigning unused billable hours from past periods
• Shifting resources to unstaffed work
• Running “what-if” simulations to see how staffing changes affect future outcomes

 

At Kantata, we built our Utilization Optimization dashboard to do exactly this, with a focus on delivering new levels of clarity around steps 3 and 4. This isn’t a theoretical model; it’s a working example of how your PS tech should operate, and a clear articulation of what’s possible when BI evolves from passive reporting to proactive guidance.

The Impact: From Lagging Metrics to Leading Performance

Imagine knowing today which projects are at risk of dragging your numbers down next month — and knowing exactly who to reassign or which work to prioritize to stay on track.

This kind of intelligence moves beyond a simple productivity boost by giving your business a strategic advantage. It empowers resource managers to plan smarter, delivery leads to pivot faster, and executives to manage the business with confidence, not guesswork.

Closing Thought: Don’t Just Measure Utilization — Master It

Utilization does more than indicate past performance. It’s a leading indicator of delivery health, profitability, and operational excellence — but only if your technology evolves along with your business.

The most mature PSOs don’t just wonder “How did we do?” They ask:

• “What’s our trajectory?”
• “Where are our hidden opportunities?”
• “What can we do right now to improve outcomes?”

The next level of data maturity is here. If you’re ready to move from passive measurement to proactive mastery, it’s time to raise your expectations — and your toolset. The Utilization Optimization dashboard is our example of what’s possible. What will yours be?