The Unit the Demand Side Uses
Why demand arrives in people and vagueness, how to convert a claim into something an account can hold, and the four questions that do the conversion.
How six claims arrived at one resourcing desk in a single week
Sponsor email; repeated twice since.
Portfolio board, decision deferred.
Said in a steering meeting, minuted.
Nobody has checked what last year actually used.
Named person, bounded, with dates.
The service it supported closed in March.
One claim in six arrived in a form the account could use. The other five were converted by the planner, alone, using assumptions nobody saw. This is one employer's own week, not a statement of how commitments ought to be made.
Demand almost never arrives in the unit the plan is kept in. It arrives as "a couple of engineers", "half of Maya", "whatever it takes", "the same as last year" — commitments expressed in the unit the person making them can actually speak.
The unit used in “The Unit the Demand Side Uses” must remain stable from capacity estimate to actual result. For organisations assessing how should teams assess remote workforce management software? in relation to remote workforce management software, time and project reports can support that reconciliation, provided leave, support work and corrections retain their own definitions.
That is not a failure of discipline on their part. It is the natural form of a commitment, and the planner's job is to convert it rather than to send it back.
The assumptions behind “The Unit the Demand Side Uses” can also be tested against AIHR workforce-planning guide. Record which definitions transfer to the local plan and which do not.
Why the vague form persists
Because the person making the claim does not know the answer precisely and would be wrong if they pretended to. "A couple of engineers" is an honest statement of an imprecise need.
Demanding precision upstream usually produces a fabricated number that is then treated as firm, which is worse than the vagueness it replaced.
The four questions that convert a claim
- How much, in any unit you like?
- Starting when, and ending when?
- Does it need particular people or particular skills?
- What happens if it is half of what you asked for?
Four questions, two minutes, and they convert almost any claim into something an account can hold. The fourth is the one that produces the most information, because it reveals whether the claim is a quantity or a threshold.
Quantities and thresholds
Some claims scale: half the people, half the work, twice as long. Others do not: below a certain level nothing useful happens at all, and the partial allocation produces no output and consumes the capacity anyway.
Writing which kind each claim is, in one word, changes every subsequent allocation decision. Most registers do not have the field.
Converting without inventing
The conversion has to be visible. "A couple of engineers" becomes "2.0 FTE assumed, converted by the planner, not confirmed by the sponsor" — and that note travels with the number for as long as it stays unconfirmed.
A converted number recorded as though it were given is how an assumption becomes a commitment without anybody deciding.
Giving the number back
Having converted, send the figure back in the unit the claimant uses: "that's about two people from January to March, which is 936 available hours; is that right?"
Half the time the answer is no, and the correction arrives before the plan is published rather than during the quarter. That single reply is the cheapest piece of error correction in the whole process.
Claims with no end date
The most common defect and the most expensive. A claim with a start and no end consumes capacity indefinitely, and nothing in any system prompts anybody to close it.
Every claim gets an end date even if the date is a guess, because a guessed end date produces a review and an absent one produces a standing charge against capacity forever.
The claim that is really a person
Frequently the sponsor does not want capacity; they want a particular person, for reasons of context, trust or history. "Half of Maya" is not a quantity, it is a name with a fraction attached.
Those claims should be recorded as named rather than as generic capacity, because substituting somebody else silently fails and the failure is attributed to the plan.
What the account records
For each claim: who is claiming, how much in the account's unit, start and end, whether it is named or generic, whether it is a quantity or a threshold, and its state.
Seven fields, most of them one word. The state field is the subject of its own section later in this collection, and it is the one that decides what the claim is worth.
The standing claim that arrives once
Some claims are made once and apply forever: a support rota, a regulatory obligation, an on-call arrangement. They are claims on capacity in exactly the same way as a project, and they are almost never in the same document.
Pulling them into the same account as the projects is often the single largest correction available, because together they commonly account for a fifth of a team.
What to do with "whatever it takes"
Record it as unbounded, in writing, and reply with what is actually available. An unbounded claim is not a claim on capacity; it is a statement about priority, and it should be converted into one.
"There is no unbounded capacity; here is what exists; which of these other claims should it come from" is a question the claimant can answer, and it is the only form in which the conversation goes anywhere.
Why this is the planner's job and not the sponsor's
Because the planner owns the unit and the account, and because the conversion requires knowledge of the shrinkage, the skills and the other claims — none of which the sponsor has.
Trying to push the conversion upstream produces either silence or invented precision. Doing it downstream, visibly, with the assumption written next to the number, is the arrangement that holds.