Delivery Hour Targets are a separate concept from team allocations, but are related in a way. Delivery Hours Targets are part of filling out your Payroll Grid.

For example, if your designer, Brian, who is 100% allocated to the delivery team has only 15 hours to target for Delivery Time (sometimes referred to as billable time) then where exactly have those other 25 hours per week gone?

The question you’ll ask yourself here is, for a given role, how much of their time are you expecting to be spent in a realistic, ideal scenario on Delivery work per week?

You might think, well, if Brian is 100% allocated to the Delivery Team and works 40 hours a week, why wouldn’t it be 40?

Great question.

Our theory behind Delivery Hour Targets “bakes in” the idea that your pure producers probably can’t spend 40 hours a week delivering client work without going to the bathroom, attending an internal meeting, attending internal training/events or taking a coffee break.

Typically, we see a standard expectation for a pure producer to be around 32 hours a week, leaving 8 hours per week for these other things.

In the case of someone with more managerial responsibilities on the delivery team, their delivery target may be even lower since they’ll likely spend most of their time managing and overseeing the members of their team. Their salary may still be 100% allocated to the delivery department since their role is designed to support that function of the business, but their time may not be spent actually working directly on client deliverables.

Conversely, Freelancers are only present in the Payroll Grid if they are providing the ‘core services’ of your agency (in other words, are not Pass-Through). If they are present in the Payroll Grid, they may not actually have that baked-in Non-Delivery time because of the nature of freelance work. Often, it’s billed by the hour and therefore seeing a freelancer/freelance team bill out at almost all of their hours (if not all) then would be OK in our books.

Ultimately you as the client get to set this number. We’ve seen very “relaxed” agencies in Europe set an expectation for 24 hours a week for a pure producer, and we’ve also seen more aggressive agencies set expectations around the 36-hour-per-week mark.

The important thing here is to try and accurately reflect what the expectation would be for each individual, in an ideal circumstance where there is an unlimited amount of client work to do - for how of their time would be spent directly working on client deliverables.

**ℹ️** If you have any other questions on the topic, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your Parakeeto Account Manager so they’re able to give you the clarity you need!