What a Plan Already Owes
Why the demand side of a capacity account is a book of claims rather than a forecast, where those claims actually live, and what the book usually shows the first time it is assembled.
Claims on one team's next quarter, as found in six places
Signed off in March, with dates.
Recurs every quarter; nobody re-books it.
Decision deferred twice; still in the plan.
No number, no dates, repeated three times since.
Measured once, in a quarter nobody remembers.
Closed in January; still in two spreadsheets.
Six claims on a team of four. Two are confirmed and come to 2.0 FTE, one is provisional at 1.0, two rest on nothing at all and one is for work that finished in January. Added up, the book already exceeds the team, and no single document anywhere says so.
The demand side of a capacity account is not a forecast. It is a list of claims already made against capacity that exists, and most of those claims were made in conversations, minutes and emails rather than in anything anybody would call a plan.
The reconciliation in “What a Plan Already Owes” is strongest when assumptions and current work records can be examined separately. A team considering see the platform guidance for this step for how employee monitoring works can add time and project context, with transparent settings, limited access and a clear correction route around consequential decisions.
Assembling the list for the first time is uncomfortable, quick and almost always produces the same finding: the book exceeds the capacity, and no single document anywhere said so.
Teams documenting “What a Plan Already Owes” may use Australian Productivity Commission insights as an independent reference. Test the approach against actual constraints and accountable decision owners.
Why it is a book rather than a forecast
Because the claims exist already. Nobody has to predict them: they were made, by named people, on dates, and they are being honoured right now by whoever remembers them.
Forecasting belongs to the work that has not been asked for yet. Everything that has been asked for is bookkeeping, and bookkeeping is a solved problem that this field mostly declines to solve.
Where the claims actually live
Steering group minutes. Portfolio board decisions. A sponsor's email. A contract with a service level in it. A rota. A regulatory obligation with a date. A spreadsheet from a project that closed last year and was never deleted.
Six to ten places in a typical organisation, none of which is the capacity plan, and no two of which use the same unit.
The assembly, which takes a day
Go to each place, write down every claim it contains on the period in question, convert each to the account's unit, and put them in one list with their source.
One day for a team, two or three for a department. The output is longer than anybody expects and contains at least one claim that everybody had forgotten.
What the first assembly always finds
Claims for work that has finished. Claims nobody can source. Claims that were provisional two years ago and have been treated as firm ever since. And a total that exceeds the net capacity figure from the supply side.
The excess is the finding. It was always there; it had never been written as one number.
Why nobody noticed
Because each claim was reasonable when it was made, each was made by somebody with the authority to make it, and no single person sees all of them.
Overcommitment in most organisations is not a decision anybody took. It is the arithmetic consequence of a dozen decisions taken separately by people who could each see only their own.
The claim with no owner
Standing obligations — support, regulatory work, maintenance — are claims that nobody re-authorises, and they are the largest single category in most books.
They need an owner for exactly the same reason project claims do: so that when capacity is short, somebody can be asked whether this one still needs to be what it is.
Keeping the book current
Two rules and nothing else: every new claim gets written down when it is made, and every claim has an end date that triggers a question.
Without the first, the book decays within a quarter. Without the second, it grows forever and becomes a list of everything the organisation has ever wanted.
The book and the plan
The book is the input; the plan is what happens after the subtraction. Keeping them as separate documents matters, because a book that is edited to make the plan work has stopped being a record of what was promised.
Where the subtraction comes out negative, the answer is an allocation decision rather than a quiet adjustment to the book.
Who should hold it
The person who owns the capacity account, with the claims owned by whoever made them. The holder maintains the list; the claimants own their lines and are asked to confirm them each cycle.
That split keeps the book honest: the holder cannot quietly downgrade somebody's claim, and the claimant cannot quietly inflate it.
The six places to look first
- Steering and portfolio board minutes for the period.
- The service catalogue or contracts with response commitments in them.
- Rotas and on-call arrangements.
- The sponsor's inbox, which means asking them.
- Last period's plan, for anything that overran.
- The regulatory or compliance calendar.
Three of the six are not project documents, which is why project tooling never produces the whole book on its own.
What it is worth
The book is the only document in most organisations that can answer the question everybody asks at the start of a quarter — what are we already committed to — and the answer is usually available in a day.
That ratio, one day against a question nobody can currently answer, is the best in this collection.