Can you take another job? Check capacity before promising a date.

Consider a small engineering design practice. Several colleagues can prepare drawings, but only one currently has the experience and authority to approve a particular design. The drawing work could start tomorrow. The approval cannot happen until Friday. Offering a completed design on Wednesday would turn a promising enquiry into an avoidable problem.

For a familiar service, identify the few steps that matter to the commitment. What must arrive from the customer? Which skills are required? Is a review, piece of equipment or outside contribution needed before the next step can begin? Work backwards from the requested completion date and check those dependencies.

The purpose is a credible answer to the customer. It need not become an elaborate scheduling exercise. Where the work is unfamiliar, however, make time for an assessment before confirming a date. An empty calendar slot is not evidence that the job fits.

Start with time genuinely available for the relevant work after leave, meetings, supervision and other standing commitments. Include preparation and completion effort in the job estimate unless you have already allowed for them elsewhere. Consistent definitions matter more than a detailed spreadsheet that different people interpret differently.

Here is a fictional example for technical review work in the design practice. These figures illustrate one coming week; they are not recommended utilisation levels.

Technical review capacity	Hours
Available after standing commitments	26
Already committed to existing jobs	22
Deliberately reserved for unplanned work	4
Remaining for new commitments without another decision	0
Required by the new enquiry	5

Accepting the enquiry would require 31 hours including the reserve. The gap is five hours if that reserve is to remain intact. Releasing all four reserved hours would still leave a one-hour shortfall. Spare drawing time does not remove the review requirement.

There may be a workable alternative. Another suitably qualified colleague could review part of the work. The customer might accept a later date or a useful staged delivery. Explore these options before committing. Moving an existing customer without agreement merely transfers the problem to someone else.

Weekly averages can hide the days when demand and the right skills fail to coincide. NHS England's guidance on aligning demand and capacity explains why averages alone do not show day-to-day variation adequately. Its setting is general practice. The useful principle here is to examine variation; its clinical arrangements should not be imported into a commercial service.

For your selected service, review a run of recent working days. Record when requests arrived, when customers needed the result and how much effort the critical step required. Include work you declined or postponed. Completed jobs alone leave part of the demand invisible.

Ask colleagues which peaks were predictable and which were surprises. A regular month-end deadline differs from an unexpected repair. Decide what flexibility each situation needs, and make the cost of keeping that flexibility visible. Choose the reserve from your own work and commitments, rather than adopting a universal percentage.

A sales conversation, a held slot and a confirmed order should not all consume capacity in the same way. Define who owns a provisional booking, how long it remains valid and what happens when it expires. Otherwise cautious colleagues may block time for enquiries that have gone quiet, while new customers are told there is no room.

Give the people taking enquiries a usable decision boundary. They should know which familiar jobs they can confirm themselves, when a specialist must review an estimate and who can release reserved capacity. They also need a named alternative when the usual decision-maker is unavailable.

This complements the arrangements for service exceptions and additional work. Deciding that an extra task is commercially acceptable does not establish that everyone affected can deliver it on the proposed date. Check both the customer agreement and the operational consequences.

If a colleague regularly rescues a deadline by working into the evening, the schedule can appear more reliable than it is. Discuss what was required to deliver the promise. Decide whether the estimate, service offer or available capacity needs to change, rather than treating the extra effort as a permanent resource.

The UK HSE's Management Standards on demands call for achievable work within agreed hours and a match between skills and demands. That supports reviewing commitments with the people doing the work. It does not provide a universal safe number of hours or a capacity formula for every European business.

Developing another colleague's expertise may ease the constraint over time. Allow for the learning and supervision it requires now. A trainee is not automatically interchangeable with the specialist on today's order. If development time is always the first thing removed for urgent work, the business can remain dependent on the same person.

Begin with a shared view of the skill required, estimated effort, promised date and booking status. Distinguish an unresolved customer dependency from confirmed availability. Let colleagues revise an estimate and explain why it changed. The aim is to help the next decision, not to punish someone for discovering that a job is harder than expected.

When several people can accept work, the final confirmation must use the same current capacity. Two colleagues should not be able to promise the last available slot from separate lists. Software can recheck availability as a booking is confirmed and ask for another decision when commitments collide. The priority between customers remains a business rule that people understand and can challenge.

Choose one service this week and revisit several recent delivery promises with sales and operations. Find the step that set the date, compare the capacity assumed with what was available, and agree one change to how the next enquiry is assessed. Our business process analysis connects these decisions with responsibilities, information and practical software. A useful plan gives employees the confidence to make a promise they can keep.