Who Is Allowed to Decide
The four decisions a shortage forces, who should take each, and what goes wrong when they are all taken by the person holding the spreadsheet.
A shortage forces four decisions: which claims proceed, which are deferred, whether to add capacity, and whether to absorb the difference. Each belongs to a different level, and in most organisations all four are taken by default by whoever is building the plan.
The reconciliation in “Who Is Allowed to Decide” is strongest when assumptions and current work records can be examined separately. A team considering open the official operational resource for how to calculate idle time can add time and project context, with transparent settings, limited access and a clear correction route around consequential decisions.
That is not delegation; it is the absence of a decision, and it has consequences that fall on people who never agreed to them.
The assumptions behind “Who Is Allowed to Decide” can also be tested against Microsoft Power BI guidance. Record which definitions transfer to the local plan and which do not.
The four decisions and their owners
Which claims proceed: the portfolio owner, or whoever can cancel a commitment. Which are deferred: the same person, in consultation with claimants. Whether to add capacity: whoever owns the budget. And whether to absorb: nobody should, which is why it must be visible.
The planner owns none of the four and prepares all of them.
Why they drift down to the planner
Because the planner is the only person who sees the whole account, and because escalation is slow. Faced with a decision today and a board in three weeks, a planner will make the decision today.
That is the correct instinct operationally and it quietly moves authority to somebody who does not have it.
The cost of deciding at the wrong level
A deferral decided by the planner is heard by the claimant as a planning failure. The same deferral decided by the portfolio owner is heard as a priority, which is what it is.
Nothing about the outcome changes; everything about how it lands does, and the second version does not damage the account's credibility.
The standing delegation
The practical fix: an agreed, written delegation — the planner may decide below a threshold, must escalate above it.
"Up to twenty hours, or any claim already marked provisional, the planner decides; anything larger goes to the portfolio owner with the account attached." Two sentences, agreed once, and the drift stops.
The decision that must not be delegated
Absorption. Nobody should be allowed to decide that a team will work beyond its capacity, least of all implicitly by failing to decide anything else.
Where absorption is happening, it should appear as a line in the account with a name against it. That line is usually enough to produce one of the other three decisions instead.
Speed, which is the real constraint
Most decisions drift down because the right level is too slow. A portfolio board meeting monthly cannot resolve a question that arises on the ninth.
An out-of-cycle route — one named person who can decide between meetings, with the decision recorded for the next board — removes most of the drift and costs nothing.
Who should be in the room
Whoever can cancel a claim, the planner, and one person who will have to do the work. The third is frequently omitted and is the only one who can say whether a proposed allocation is workable.
Decisions taken without that voice produce allocations that look reasonable on paper and fail in week two for reasons nobody in the room could have known.
The decision log
Four fields: what was decided, by whom, on what date, and what it displaced. One line per decision.
Over a year it becomes the record of how the organisation actually prioritises, which is almost always different from the rule it believes it uses — and that comparison is the most useful annual review available.
What the planner should refuse to do
Decide which claim loses. Prepare it, present it, recommend if asked, and leave the choice where it belongs.
Planners who take that decision acquire an authority they cannot defend, and the first contested case will be decided against them by somebody more senior who was not shown the arithmetic.
The delegation, written out
- Below 20 hours, or any claim marked provisional: the planner decides.
- Above that, or anything in the must band: the portfolio owner.
- Adding capacity: the budget holder, with the account attached.
- Absorbing: nobody; it appears as a named line instead.
Four lines, agreed once, and they resolve the ninety per cent of cases that otherwise drift to whoever is quickest.
When the decision is not taken at all
The common ending: the account is published, the options are listed, and nothing comes back. Silence is a decision to absorb, taken by default.
Recording it as such — "no decision received; difference absorbed by the team" — in the following month's account is the only way the silence becomes visible. It usually produces a decision the second time.
The sentence that fixes most of this
"Here is the account, here is the difference, here are the three options, and the decision is yours by Friday."
It is short, it is not confrontational, and it puts a date on something that otherwise resolves itself by absorption.