Hierarchy organization: The employees report to the managers/ supervisor while that sub-group are living inside a box, so the upper level management do not care of what is going on within the box. This caused the miss-use of power for some of the lower level managers and supervisors, because they can direct the work to their preferred person or reduce hours or put the employee in a situation to accept any work while he/she knows there is not enough allocated hours.
- The target utilization is always in increase, so with the target of 95% or more for the utilization (and maybe 100% next time), there is not much of choices for the employees to control the utilization. The work is coming from the higher managers, they might use a cheaper rate engineer to perform the task, while the more expensive engineer might not get enough work until something happens that only the more expensive one can do (which is rare), then they use the target utilizations to evaluate the employee, while the employee does not have any control over his/her utilization.
In a perfect scenario, the employee has to accept any job, for example you know that this task takes 10 hours, the managers give you 5 hours and you will accept, because you want to be applied. Or you finish a task early, but you still would charge the maximum you can, because you want to be utilized. At the end of the day, the manager has a power to use your utilization against you (the one that he is controlling not you) for your end of the year evaluation or quarterly evaluation. So if you do not bend over, you do not get enough work and you might loose your job if the manager does not like you for any reason.
- Group protection strategy: This is also about the utilization, "friends protect each other", that means I have 120% utilization and my friend also has 95% utilization, there is a person who can do the extra 20% utilization that I have and he only has 80% utilization, so it makes sense I delegate that 20% to the person who has 80% utilization. But I am not doing this, I will keep or send that job to my friend to protect my friend in the upcoming week or month.
Or if I am a manager/ supervisor, I might keep the job in my group unless I have preferences in other groups, for example I know a manager who send jobs to engineer in other group to keep him applied because that engineer is one of the relatives (cannot prove, but that how it looks like, because I heard they are relatives and I see how the work is transferred there, while there are almost 2 engineers in our group that are not applied to their target utilization, but they cannot say anything, manager has all the power).
- Managers for sub-groups are provided with less utilization goals, the expectation maybe to help on proposals, offset meeting times or the time they should plan or line up works. But never the less the group utilization is not used against the manager in his/her evaluation.
