Underallocation

A mid-level designer on your team earns around €60,000 per year. That's roughly €31 per hour at 160 hours/month. If they're consistently allocated at only 60% — 96 hours instead of 160 — you're paying €1,984 per month for hours that produce nothing. Over a year, that's nearly €24,000 in wasted salary alone.

Now multiply that across a team of ten where three or four people are chronically underbooked. The math gets painful fast.

Underallocation is the quiet twin of overallocation. It doesn't scream — nobody complains about having too little work (at least not right away). But your profit margin feels it every month.

Why It Stays Hidden

People fill their days. An underallocated team member doesn't sit idle staring at the wall — they stretch tasks to fill time, attend meetings they don't need, or do speculative work that never ships. From the outside, they look busy. Only when you compare their billable hours against their availability does the gap become obvious.

Three Common Causes

• Poor pipeline timing — projects end but new ones haven't kicked off yet
• Skill mismatch — incoming work doesn't match who's free (a motion designer sitting idle while you're desperate for UX researchers)
• Invisible availability — managers don't know who has capacity because there's no shared view of the schedule

The third one is the most fixable. When your timeline clearly shows gaps in someone's schedule, a PM can spot it and pull work forward or reallocate tasks. That visibility is the difference between proactive capacity planning and discovering the waste in your quarterly review.