Standing Commitments Nobody Re-books
The claims that recur without being re-authorised, why they are the largest category in most books, and the annual question that keeps them honest.
Some claims on capacity renew themselves. A support rota, a regulatory return, a maintenance window, a committee seat, a service level in a contract signed four years ago. Nobody re-books them and nobody can remember authorising them.
The commitments described in “Standing Commitments Nobody Re-books” become easier to reconcile when planned work can be compared with a consistent record of project time. A team reviewing a practical approach to employee monitoring data security for employee monitoring data security can add current operational evidence while keeping the claimant, approval state and decision owner explicit.
Together they are usually the largest category in a book of claims, and they are the category least likely to appear in any planning conversation.
As a separate benchmark for “Standing Commitments Nobody Re-books”, see UK labour-market statistics. Keep source data, calculation, override and decision visible as distinct steps.
Why they disappear from view
Because they do not generate decisions. A project is proposed, discussed, approved and reviewed; a standing commitment simply continues, and continuation produces no agenda item anywhere.
Over a few years an organisation accumulates enough of them to consume a significant share of its capacity without any of them having been weighed against anything.
The four kinds
- Contractual: a service level, a response time, a maintenance obligation.
- Regulatory: returns, inspections, mandatory reporting.
- Operational: rotas, on-call, duty cover, business-as-usual support.
- Organisational: committees, working groups, governance attendance.
The fourth is the one most often omitted and the easiest to reduce. The first two are the hardest to move and should be recorded precisely for that reason.
Putting a number on each
Hours per period, measured rather than estimated where possible. A committee seat is a meeting plus preparation plus follow-up, which is usually three times the meeting.
Most standing commitments have never been costed in hours, and the first costing is routinely a surprise to the person who holds the commitment as much as to anybody else.
The annual question
Once a year, for each standing commitment: does this still need to be what it is, at this size, held by this team?
That single question, asked on a schedule, is the only mechanism that ever removes one. Without it they are permanent by construction.
What the question finds
Commitments for services that no longer exist. Committee seats for bodies that have merged. Response times agreed for a customer who has since changed what they buy. Maintenance on systems that were replaced.
In most organisations the first annual review removes or reduces between one and three of them, which is more capacity than any process improvement available that year.
The contractual ones
Where a commitment sits in a contract, the hours are not negotiable until renewal, and the renewal date belongs in the book beside the number.
Knowing that a service level consumes 0.4 FTE and comes up for renewal in eighteen months is a planning input and a procurement input, and it is normally held by neither function.
The ones that grew
Standing commitments expand quietly. A rota that was one person a day becomes two; a return that took a week takes three; a committee that met quarterly meets monthly.
Recording the number each year is what makes the growth visible. An unrecorded commitment cannot grow, in the sense that nobody can ever demonstrate that it did.
Who owns a standing commitment
Somebody must, by name, and for most of them nobody does. The holder of the rota is not the owner of the decision to have a rota, and that distinction is what makes the annual question answerable.
Assigning owners to standing commitments is a half-hour exercise and is usually the hardest half hour in the whole assembly, because the honest answer for several of them is that nobody has owned them for years.
In the book
Each standing commitment is a row with a quantity, an owner, a source document where one exists, a renewal or review date, and a state.
Their state is normally confirmed, and it should be checked rather than assumed, because a surprising number turn out to be lapsed obligations that everybody has continued to honour.
Costing a committee seat properly
- The meeting itself, in hours per period.
- Preparation, which is usually equal to the meeting.
- Follow-up and actions arising.
- The deputy's time where attendance is covered.
Four lines, and the total is commonly three or four times the number anybody would have guessed from the calendar entry. That is why these are worth costing rather than estimating.
The review that is not a cut
The annual question works only if it is genuinely a question. Where teams learn that it is a mechanism for removing capacity, the answers become defensive and the exercise produces nothing.
Running it as a review of whether the commitment still fits the organisation, with the possibility that the answer is to increase it, is what keeps the answers truthful.
What they do to a capacity conversation
Once they are in the book, the conversation about a shortfall changes shape. Instead of a choice between projects, there is a visible column of standing work that has never been weighed against anything.
That column is often where the answer is, and it only becomes available once somebody has written it down.