Intake backlog: an instruction that does not fit the shift
You supervise a six-person intake team that normally processes 120 requests per shift. Two staff are absent, leaving four people and no relief. A sudden batch of 90 new requests arrives at 10:00, alongside 40 routine renewals that are already two days past their service target. Each complex request needs about 20 minutes of review; renewals need about 6 minutes. Your manager has told you that the two-day backlog must be cleared today, but the complex requests include three flagged as urgent by a partner agency, and policy requires urgent items to be triaged within one hour. You have six working hours left in the shift, and one team member is still in training and cannot sign off complex work alone.
1. Is the manager's instruction achievable? Show the capacity arithmetic and state what you do in the first hour.
Read the worked answer
Capacity first. Four staff × 6 hours × 60 = 1,440 person-minutes available. Demand is 40 renewals × 6 = 240 minutes plus 90 complex items × 20 = 1,800 minutes, so 2,040 minutes are needed against 1,440 available. The shortfall is 600 minutes, roughly ten person-hours. The instruction is not achievable as written, and repeating it more firmly does not change the arithmetic.
Order of work in the first hour:
- Triage the three agency-flagged items immediately. The one-hour requirement is the only deadline here with an external safety consequence, and it costs about 60 minutes.
- Tell the manager inside the hour, with the numbers above and a specific menu of trade-offs rather than a general "we're swamped": clear all 40 renewals and about 60 of the 90 complex items, or clear all complex items and carry the renewals.
- Ask for exactly one of three things: overtime cover, temporary sign-off authority for the trainee's work, or written authorisation to miss the renewal target.
Why not simply compress the work: fitting 2,040 minutes into 1,440 means cutting complex reviews from 20 to about 14 minutes each, which is precisely where triage errors are introduced.
2. The trainee can handle renewals alone but needs countersignature on complex work. How do you use this constraint rather than treat it as a loss?
Read the worked answer
The constraint is on sign-off, not on doing. That distinction is where the capacity is recovered.
- Assign the trainee the full renewal stream (240 minutes of work) as their primary queue. This is work they can complete and close without a countersignature, and it protects the service target that is already breached.
- Pair the trainee with an experienced reviewer for a second stream: the trainee performs the 20 minutes of review and drafting, and the experienced person spends a short, batched period each hour countersigning rather than reviewing from scratch. Batching countersignatures into three 15-minute blocks is more efficient than interrupting a reviewer per item.
- Keep the countersigning reviewer out of the urgent queue. Mixing the two means the urgent items wait behind countersignature requests.
Residual risk to name openly: batched countersignature means some complex work is signed off after a delay, and the experienced reviewer is approving output they did not personally verify line by line. That is a real quality trade-off, so it should be one of the options the manager chooses between, recorded in the shift log, rather than something you quietly absorb.
3. At 15:00 the manager repeats the instruction to clear everything and stops responding. What is your judgement call and what do you put in writing?
Read the worked answer
The absence of a reply is not authorisation to silently pick one option, nor is it a reason to stop and wait. The judgement call is to act on the option that is least likely to cause harm and most reversible, then document it.
Act: protect the three urgent items (already done), complete the renewal stream so a known, measurable target stops deteriorating, and process complex items in arrival order with the remaining capacity. Do not start an item you cannot finish.
Write, at 15:00, in the shift log: the capacity calculation, the original instruction and its timestamp, the 15:00 repeat, the options offered, the option taken and why, and the items deliberately deferred with their arrival times. Facts and times, not frustration.
Escalate on the record: a short written note to the manager's manager is appropriate once an instruction has been repeated that cannot be met and the manager has gone quiet. The test is whether a person reading the file next week could reconstruct what you knew at 15:00 and why you chose as you did. If they could not, the note is incomplete.