Where the Claims Actually Are
The six places a book of claims is assembled from, why the project tool holds less than half, and how to do the assembly in a day.
One department's claims, by where each was found
The only source anybody expected to use.
Response times; nobody had costed them in hours.
In a different system from everything else.
Quantities inferred by the planner.
Two finished; one never started.
Dated, mandatory, invisible to the portfolio.
Four of the six sources are not project documents, and they hold more than half the committed capacity. A book assembled from the portfolio tool alone would have shown 3.2 FTE of a true 5.1. This is one employer's own assembly, not a benchmark.
Claims on capacity live in six or more places, and the project management tool is only one of them. In most organisations it holds between a third and a half of the real commitment.
The commitments described in “Where the Claims Actually Are” become easier to reconcile when planned work can be compared with a consistent record of project time. A team reviewing using how to monitor employees without being intrusive in workforce forecasts for how to monitor employees without being intrusive can add current operational evidence while keeping the claimant, approval state and decision owner explicit.
That is why books assembled from tooling alone look tidy and understate the position, and why the assembly has to be done by hand the first time.
Additional context for “Where the Claims Actually Are” is available from New Zealand productivity resources. Use external material to prompt a specific validation check rather than replace local judgement.
The six sources
Board and steering minutes. Contracts with service commitments. Rotas and on-call arrangements. Correspondence with sponsors. The previous cycle's plan. And the compliance or regulatory calendar.
Four of those six are not project documents. They are owned by different functions, held in different systems, and expressed in units that have nothing to do with each other.
Why the portfolio tool is not enough
Because it contains projects, and a great deal of committed capacity is not a project: support, regulation, contractual response, governance, and the standing work that keeps the lights on.
A portfolio tool that shows a team as sixty per cent allocated is usually describing sixty per cent of the project claims against a hundred per cent of the capacity.
Doing the assembly in a day
Morning: read the minutes for the period and list every claim. Pull the contracts and the compliance calendar. Open the rota.
Afternoon: search correspondence, convert everything to one unit, set states, and sort by claimant. One person, one day, and the output is the first complete picture the organisation has had.
What to do about disagreement between sources
Two sources describing the same claim differently is information: the minute says one thing, the sponsor's email says another, and the difference is usually scope creep that was never re-agreed.
Record both, flag the difference, and take it to the claimant. That one step converts the assembly from bookkeeping into something that actively finds problems.
The sources specific to your organisation
Most places have one or two unusual ones: a customer portal that accepts requests directly, a regulator with a standing requirement, an internal service desk whose tickets consume engineering time.
They are findable by asking the team where work arrives from, which is a question with a surprisingly long answer in any organisation that has been running for a decade.
Keeping the list of sources
The list of places claims arrive from is itself a document worth holding, because it is what makes the next assembly take an hour instead of a day.
It also decays: channels are added, a new tool arrives, a customer starts emailing somebody directly. Reviewing the source list annually is part of keeping the book complete.
The source that is a person
In most teams one person is a source: the long-serving member who knows about commitments nobody wrote down. They are a legitimate source and a fragile one.
Everything they know that is not in the book leaves when they do, which is the strongest practical argument for doing the assembly before the question becomes urgent.
What the assembly does to the organisation
The first complete book usually changes a conversation that had been stuck. Overcommitment stops being a complaint from the team and becomes a number with sources attached, and the discussion moves to which claims to change.
That shift is worth more than any individual finding inside the book.
Keeping it current afterwards
One line per new claim at the point of receipt, one review per cycle, and the annual question for standing commitments.
Maintenance is roughly an hour a cycle once the assembly is done. The cost is entirely in the first pass, which is a single day and is normally never repeated.
The two-column sheet for the assembly
- Left: what the source says, verbatim, with its date.
- Right: what it means in the account's unit, with the state.
Keeping the verbatim column is what lets somebody check the conversion six months later. A book that holds only the converted figure cannot be audited against its own sources, and the first person to disagree with it will be right to.
Claims that arrive without passing anybody
Service desks, customer portals and shared inboxes accept work directly from outside and consume capacity without any internal decision at all.
Those channels need either a cap or a route into the book; otherwise every other claim in the book is competing for what is left after an unmeasured one has taken its share.
The test of a complete book
Ask three people in the team to name something they are working on, and check whether the book contains it. Then ask a sponsor what they are expecting, and check the same.
Where both pass, the book is complete enough to subtract from capacity, which is the only thing it exists to do.