Some companies are very picky at making sure that all their employees got a project to work on. Especially the top engineers. I've seen quite many environments, where senior guys are the ones who have to be "120% utilized" and who are actually doing the work, while juniors are expected to be floating around doing "something not critical" and being asked to help seniors, whenever those would need an extra hand.
Battlefield
Out of the software world there is, however, a class of organizations dealing with the extremely complex tasks in the hard to predict conditions who successfully practice the completely opposite approach - making sure that their best resources are free until the very critical moment. Armies apply the idea of a reserve for ages. Reserves allow them to extremely effectively push the critical areas of their "projects" at a cost of a sub-optimal use of their best troops.
Keeping the top engineers unassigned to projects
Some software and not so software organizations try building on the same approach by making sure their best engineers are not permanently taken by projects and are always available for helping others. These organizations believe that optimizing the processes so that top people were always busy is suboptimal - every engineer can do the normal work, while top engineers are the ones to help, when a particularly difficult problem is on the way.
What about your team? When junior or mid-level person needs help, is some senior or chief engineer always available for help?
(Photo is courtesy of soldiersmediacenter @ Flickr)
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