The Provisional Claim That Never Resolves
Why provisional claims consume capacity while remaining cancellable, the deferral loop that keeps them alive, and the expiry rule that ends it.
A provisional claim is one that has been made but not decided: pencilled at a board, waiting on funding, dependent on something else. It consumes capacity in the plan and remains cancellable by somebody who does not know it is consuming anything.
The commitments described in “The Provisional Claim That Never Resolves” become easier to reconcile when planned work can be compared with a consistent record of project time. A team reviewing explore the available controls directly for workload balancing can add current operational evidence while keeping the claimant, approval state and decision owner explicit.
That asymmetry is the problem. The cost of keeping a claim provisional falls entirely on the capacity account, and the benefit of keeping it provisional falls entirely on the claimant.
Additional context for “The Provisional Claim That Never Resolves” is available from Statistics Canada labour data. Use external material to prompt a specific validation check rather than replace local judgement.
The deferral loop
A decision is deferred because information is missing. The next board has the same information, so it is deferred again. The claim stays in the plan throughout, because removing it would be presumptuous.
Three deferrals later the claim has occupied a slot in the plan for most of a year without anybody ever having approved it.
Why nobody removes it
Removing a provisional claim looks like a decision the planner is not authorised to take, and keeping it looks like prudence. Both readings are reasonable, which is why the loop is stable.
The way out is not judgement but a rule agreed in advance, applied to every claim equally.
The expiry rule
Every provisional claim carries an expiry date, set when it enters the book. If it has not been confirmed by then, it lapses automatically and the capacity is released.
Automatic is the operative word. A rule that requires somebody to decide to let a claim lapse recreates the loop with an extra step.
What a reasonable expiry is
One planning cycle for small claims, two for large ones. The principle is that a claim should not survive longer unconfirmed than the period it was supposed to consume.
A claim on next quarter that is still provisional when next quarter starts has already failed its own test.
Telling the claimant in advance
The rule is announced when the claim is recorded, not applied as a surprise: "this is in the book as provisional and expires at the September board unless it is confirmed."
That sentence does most of the work. Claimants who know their claim expires behave entirely differently from claimants who assume it persists.
The claim that lapses and comes back
Common and fine. A claim that lapses in September and is re-made in November is a new claim with a new date, and the capacity was free in between, which is the entire point.
What should not happen is a lapsed claim quietly continuing to be honoured because somebody kept working on it, which is how capacity leaks without any decision being taken.
Provisional claims and the three totals
They belong in the second total — likely — and never in the first. A plan whose committed figure includes provisional claims is overstating its obligations, which sounds conservative and is not: it causes real work to be refused in favour of work that may never be authorised.
That error is more expensive than the opposite one and far less visible.
The large provisional claim
Where a single provisional claim is big enough to change the whole plan, it deserves a different treatment: two versions of the plan, with and without it, and an explicit decision date.
That costs an hour and it converts an unresolvable planning problem into a scheduled decision for somebody who can take it.
What a provisional row carries
Quantity, claimant, the date it entered the book, the expiry date, what it is waiting on, and who can confirm it.
The fifth field is the useful one. Most provisional claims are waiting on something specific, and writing it down occasionally reveals that the thing has already happened.
The four things a provisional claim is usually waiting on
- A funding decision that sits with somebody outside the planning cycle.
- Another project finishing, or not.
- A customer or supplier confirming something.
- A person becoming available who is currently committed elsewhere.
Recording which of the four, in one word, lets the planner chase the right thing. In practice about a third of provisional claims are waiting on something that was resolved weeks earlier and nobody told the book.
Holding capacity against a provisional claim
Sometimes right: where the claim is likely, large and hard to staff at short notice, holding capacity is a legitimate hedge.
It should be recorded as a hedge, with its cost — the work that could have been done with those hours — stated beside it. A hedge nobody priced is indistinguishable from a plan that quietly has slack in it, and the two deserve different conversations.
The habit this builds
After two cycles the book stops accumulating. Claims either harden or fall away, the plan's committed figure becomes meaningful, and the conversation at the board shifts from "what is in the plan" to "what are we confirming".
That shift is the output of one rule and one date field.