Different Owners on Each Side
Why nobody owns the subtraction, the four people who own pieces of it, and the smallest arrangement that makes the account somebody's job.
The supply side is owned by a line manager, the demand side by a portfolio or a set of sponsors, the financial view by finance, and the delivery promises by delivery leads. The subtraction between supply and demand is owned by nobody.
The reconciliation in “Different Owners on Each Side” is strongest when assumptions and current work records can be examined separately. A team considering review the provider’s current guidance for employee time clock records can add time and project context, with transparent settings, limited access and a clear correction route around consequential decisions.
That gap is structural rather than personal, and it explains why capacity accounts exist in so few organisations despite everybody agreeing they would be useful.
Teams documenting “Different Owners on Each Side” may use Atlassian workload-management guide as an independent reference. Test the approach against actual constraints and accountable decision owners.
The four owners and what each sees
The line manager sees people, leave and skills, and has no visibility of what has been promised. The sponsor sees their own claim and not the others. Finance sees budget and headcount, not availability. The delivery lead sees the work and assumes the people.
Each view is complete for its purpose and none of them contains the subtraction.
Why it is nobody's job
Because the subtraction only matters when it comes out negative, and a negative answer is bad news that belongs to whoever produced it.
Organisations reliably fail to assign ownership of calculations whose output is unwelcome, and this is the clearest example of it in workforce management.
The smallest arrangement that works
One named person who owns the account, with twenty minutes a week and the authority to ask each claimant to confirm their claim.
Not a function, not a committee, and not a system. The account is a document and a routine, and the routine fails the moment it requires more than one person's attention to run.
What that person needs
Access to the leave system, the book's sources, and a standing slot to report the result. They do not need authority over allocation — deciding is somebody else's job — but they do need the right to publish the difference.
The right to publish is the only piece of authority that matters here, and it is the one most often withheld.
Who it should not be
Not a sponsor, because they have a claim. Not the line manager alone, because the supply figure then becomes a negotiating position. And not finance, because the account would drift towards budget and away from hours.
The planner sits between the two sides and belongs to neither, which is uncomfortable and is the job.
What the owner publishes
Three numbers, once a cycle: net capacity, committed claims, and the difference with its sign.
Nothing else is required. Every other artefact in this collection supports those three numbers, and an organisation that sees them regularly will develop the rest on its own.
Escalating the difference
A negative difference goes to whoever can resolve it, which is whoever can both cancel a claim and defend the cancellation. That is usually one level above the sponsors, and frequently they have never seen the numbers.
Sending it to the team is the common failure: the team cannot resolve an overcommitment and will absorb it, which converts an arithmetic problem into a wellbeing problem.
The sponsor who disputes the supply figure
Expect it, and welcome it: a sponsor who argues about the shrinkage rate has engaged with the account, which is better than one who ignores it.
Arguments about supply are finite, evidenced and resolvable. Arguments about whose work matters most are neither, and they are what the subtraction forces into the open.
Keeping the role when the person moves
Document the sources, the factors and the routine on one page, and name a deputy who runs the account once a year.
Accounts that live in one person's habits die with their move, and the organisation reverts to the state this collection describes within two cycles.
The four questions the owner asks each cycle
- Line manager: has anything changed about who is here?
- Each claimant: is your claim still what it was, and until when?
- Standing commitment owners: is this still needed at this size?
- Delivery: what actually got used against each claim last period?
Four questions, a dozen short replies, twenty minutes to send. That is the entire operating routine, and it is what keeps the account true between the quarterly assemblies.
Where the role usually sits
In practice it lands with a resourcing manager, a PMO analyst, a chief of staff or the delivery lead who most dislikes surprises.
What matters is not the title but that the person has no claim of their own in the book. A planner who is also a sponsor will, entirely without intending to, produce an account that accommodates their own work.
What the arrangement costs
Twenty minutes a week, an hour a cycle for the reconciliation, and one day for the first assembly. Against that, the organisation gains the ability to answer what it is committed to.
Stated that way the trade is obvious, which is why the barrier is never cost. It is that somebody has to be willing to publish a number that somebody else will not like.