Claims That Live in an Email
The commitments made in correspondence and conversation, why they bind in practice regardless of their form, and how to get them into the book without a governance programme.
A large share of the claims against any team's capacity were made in an email, a corridor, or a meeting that produced no minute. They are real in every sense that matters: somebody is expecting the work, and somebody is doing it.
The commitments described in “Claims That Live in an Email” become easier to reconcile when planned work can be compared with a consistent record of project time. A team reviewing 7 minute rule payroll for planning teams for 7 minute rule payroll can add current operational evidence while keeping the claimant, approval state and decision owner explicit.
The instinct to insist they go through a formal process is understandable and usually fails, because the informal route exists for a reason — it is faster and it matches how the work actually arrives.
As a separate benchmark for “Claims That Live in an Email”, see OECD employment analysis. Keep source data, calculation, override and decision visible as distinct steps.
Why the informal claim persists
Because formal intake is slow and the need is immediate, because the claimant has the authority to ask, and because the team wants to be helpful. None of those is a defect.
A capacity process that treats informal claims as illegitimate produces a book that describes a parallel universe while the real work goes on beside it.
The cheap intake
One line, one channel, no form: whoever receives a request writes it in the book with the date, the claimant and a quantity in any unit.
The whole intake is four fields: who is asking, for what, roughly how large, and by when. Anything longer gets routed around, and an intake that gets routed around records nothing.
Thirty seconds at the point of receipt. That is the entire intake process, and it captures what a governance workflow would not, because it does not ask the claimant to do anything.
Converting afterwards rather than at intake
The conversion to the account's unit, the state, the end date — all of that happens later, when the book is reviewed, by the planner.
Front-loading those questions onto the person receiving the request is what makes intake processes fail. The receiver has ten seconds of the claimant's attention and should spend it on what, who and when.
The claim nobody remembers receiving
The hardest case: work that has simply started. Somebody is doing it, nobody can say who asked, and the only evidence is in the work itself.
Those get recorded as assumed with the work as their evidence, and the next review asks the obvious question. About half turn out to have a claimant who confirms; the rest are capacity that has been leaking into something nobody authorised.
Searching correspondence
For a first assembly, a search of the planner's own mailbox for the period finds most of them: the words that recur are "could you", "would it be possible", "we'll need" and "just a small thing".
An hour of searching, once, builds the baseline. Thereafter the cheap intake keeps it current.
The verbal claim
Nothing captures it except the receiver writing it down afterwards. That is the whole technique: after any conversation that contained a request, one line in the book.
Teams that adopt this report the same side effect — people start being more precise in the conversation, because they can see it being recorded.
What to send back
A short acknowledgement with the recorded version: "noted as about two weeks of work from March, provisional until the April board".
That reply does three things at once: confirms receipt, states the quantity in a form the claimant can correct, and makes the state visible. Half the corrections to the book arrive this way.
Where this changes behaviour
Claimants who can see the book stop making claims they do not need. A visible queue is self-regulating in a way that an invisible one is not, because the cost of a request becomes apparent to the person making it.
That effect is larger than anything the planner can achieve by refusing requests, and it costs nothing but visibility.
The claims that should stay informal
Small, short, one-off requests that fit inside the interrupt allowance. Recording a ten-minute favour as a claim on capacity is bureaucracy for its own sake and will discredit the book.
The threshold should be stated: anything over half a day goes in the book, anything under it comes out of the support allowance, which is why the support allowance has to be measured.
The three words that mark a claim arriving
"Could you", "we'll need", "just a small". Every organisation has its own set and these are close to universal.
Teaching a team to hear those phrases as the start of a capacity claim, rather than as conversation, is a five-minute briefing and it is what makes the cheap intake work without anybody policing it.
Who receives claims
In most teams, four or five people do, and only one of them maintains the book. The other four have no route to record what they received.
Giving all of them the same one-line route — a shared sheet, a channel, an address — is usually the single change that takes a book from half-complete to complete.
What good looks like
A book where nobody can name a commitment that is not in it, maintained by thirty seconds of effort per claim, with corrections arriving from claimants rather than being chased by the planner.
That state is reachable in two cycles and does not require anybody to change how they ask for things.