Your most expensive hours are spent on review. Can you see them?

Department heads answer for utilisation, multiplier and delivery. Document review takes a large share of their most senior people's time, and it shows up as a single line on a timesheet. Here is what that line hides, what it costs in net labour multiplier, and what changes when you can see it.

In short

• Review is where a department's most expensive hours go, and most firms record it as one timesheet code with no detail.
• Without detail, a department head can't see where reports wait, who is overloaded, or what the team keeps getting wrong.
• When every review event is logged, review time becomes something you can measure, find bottlenecks in and improve.
• Cutting review time by one third can lift a firm's NLM from 2.50 to 2.65 and its profit by about a fifth, if the hours saved go into billable work.
• Qrtr's first measured result is a one third cut in human review time, from the workflow alone. Qrtr is built to take that to three quarters.

Why can't department heads see review time?

Most firms record review as a single timesheet code. The hours are logged; what happened inside them is not. A timesheet says a principal spent six hours on QA review for a project. It does not say whether those hours went on reading, chasing a missing appendix, waiting for a revised draft or checking the same fix for the third time.

The rest of the record is scattered. Comments sit in Word files, sign-offs sit in email, and the issued version sits in the document management system. Each holds part of the story, and none of them can be added up.

So the person who answers for multiplier, utilisation and delivery manages one of the largest uses of senior time with almost no information about it.

How does review time affect NLM?

Cutting review time by one third can lift a consulting firm's net labour multiplier (NLM) from 2.50 to 2.65 and its profit by about a fifth. At three quarters, NLM reaches 2.83 and profit rises by almost half. Review is done by a firm's most expensive people, and on a fixed fee their review hours are rarely recovered. Every hour saved and moved to billable work raises revenue while salaries and overheads stay the same.

NLM is revenue divided by direct salary cost. The worked examples below are illustrative, in NZD. They assume review time is not recovered from the client today, and that the hours saved go into billable work at the same charge-out rate.

Project NLM

A 100-hour fixed-fee report: the author does 90 hours and a principal reviews for 10. The fee stays the same, so every review hour saved goes straight to margin.

Team NLM

A team of five graduates, two seniors and a principal costs $1.1 million a year in salaries and bills $2.72 million. Review takes 2% of graduate time, 20% of senior time and half the principal's: about 1,300 hours a year, mostly at the highest rates.

Firm NLM and profit

A firm with $2 million of direct salaries, $1.6 million of overheads and $5 million of revenue runs an NLM of 2.50 and makes $1.4 million profit. Salaries and overheads stay the same, so new revenue falls straight to profit.

A one third cut in review time moves a firm's profit by a fifth, because the hours saved belong to its most expensive people.

Where do reports get stuck in review?

Mostly in the gaps between people. A report waits for a reviewer to pick it up, then for the author to fix it, then for the approver to sign. The reading is often the shortest part. Without a record of when a report moved from one stage to the next, the waits stay invisible until a deadline arrives.

The usual bottlenecks:

• One reviewer holding far more open reviews than anyone else.
• Reports waiting days for an approver who is on site or on leave.
• Reports going round several review cycles because issues are reopened.
• Urgent jobs jumping the queue and delaying everything behind them.

Each of these is fixable once it can be seen. Moving a review to a colleague or reminding an approver takes a minute. Finding out at the deadline that a report sat idle for ten days costs far more.

What can a department head learn from review data?

Where the team needs training, where the process slows work down, and where the load is uneven. These are improvement opportunities for the system around people. Review data is a poor tool for judging individuals, and Qrtr Insights is not designed for it.

• Training. An author whose reports come back with many more issues than the team median may need support or a course. A reviewer who raises far fewer issues than colleagues is worth a conversation too. Neither is a verdict.
• Process. Time by stage shows whether reports spend their time being reviewed, being fixed or waiting for sign-off. Each points to a different fix.
• Load. Open assignments per person show who is carrying the department, before they burn out or become the single point everything waits on.

The learning stays with the firm. It builds up project by project, in the review record, instead of in the heads of a few senior people.

How much review time can a department save?

Qrtr's first measured result is a one third cut in human review time at an engineering consultancy. That saving comes from the workflow alone: reviewers raise issues on a clean copy in the browser, authors fix them in Word through the Qrtr add-in, and approval is recorded in one place.

Qrtr is built to take the saving to three quarters. The rest comes from Qrtr Check, which checks a report against its brief before a reviewer opens it and marks each requirement Met, Not Met or Needs review, with the passage it rests on. Reviewers start from that evidence instead of a blank page. We have not yet measured the combined saving, and will publish it when we have.

We have yet to meet a principal who wished they had more reviewing to do.

How does Qrtr Insights work?

Every figure comes from the review record. Each issue raised, fixed or closed, each handover and each approval is logged with who did it and when. Qrtr Insights adds those events up. Rework is the only estimate, and it is labelled as one.

The same measures are available at every level:

Each level can be filtered by project or client. A department head sees blocked and stalled reports, time by stage and the longest waits first, and can reassign a review or send a reminder from the same screen.

Questions department heads ask

How do I find out how much time my team spends on document review? Timesheets give the total hours but not where they went. To see the detail, review has to run through a system that logs each step: when a report was submitted, when issues were raised and fixed, and when it was approved. Qrtr records each of these as it happens.

How does cutting review time affect NLM? Review is mostly done by senior staff and is rarely recovered on fixed fees. In a worked example, a one third cut in review time, with the hours moved to billable work, lifts a firm's NLM from 2.50 to 2.65 and its profit by about 21%. A three quarters cut lifts NLM to 2.83 and profit by about 47%.

What is the most common review bottleneck? Waiting. Reports usually spend longer queued for a reviewer, an author or an approver than being read. Time by stage shows which wait is the longest in your department.

Will my team feel monitored? Insights are built to find improvement opportunities in training, process and load, and to prompt a conversation rather than rank people.

How much review time can Qrtr save? The first measured result is one third of human review time, from the workflow alone. Qrtr is built to reach three quarters with Qrtr Check added; that combined figure has not yet been measured.

Does Qrtr replace the reviewer? No. Reviewers and approvers make every judgement and sign every report. Qrtr gives them a cleaner workflow and evidence to start from.

Can I see review time by client or project? Yes. Every Insights view can be filtered by project or client, from the organisation down to a team.

See your department's review time

Insights come with the review workflow, so the record builds from the first report your team reviews. Start a 14-day trial, or Request Demo.