Three deadlines on the same Monday
You are the work allocation officer for a council tax team of eight. It is Monday morning and three things land at once. First, 240 revised bills must be issued by Thursday to meet a statutory deadline; missing it makes the council non-compliant. Second, a councillor has asked about 15 accounts and has been promised an answer by Wednesday. Third, an internal audit starts on Friday and has asked for a named contact and 60 sampled accounts. One experienced officer has called in sick for the week and another is on a training course Tuesday and Wednesday. Your manager is away until Thursday afternoon and left no instructions. Normal capacity is about 320 account actions a day across the team, but a revised bill takes roughly twice as long as an average action.
1. How would you allocate the work for Monday and Tuesday, and what would you deliberately not do?
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Convert everything into one unit before allocating anything. A revised bill is worth two normal actions, so 240 bills is about 480 actions - roughly 1.5 full-team days. With one officer sick and one training, I have six people, so I protect Monday and Tuesday almost entirely for bills and treat everything else as work that fits around them.
- Bills: split into two batches of 120, with the first batch complete by Tuesday afternoon so a partial issue is possible if something breaks.
- Councillor's 15 accounts: one named person, time-boxed to two hours on Tuesday. The Wednesday promise is externally visible and cheap to keep.
- Audit: reply Monday morning with a named contact and confirm the sample can be pulled on Thursday. That is ten minutes of work, not a project.
What I would not do: start the routine correspondence queue, hold meetings, or quietly absorb the shortfall by planning for unpaid overtime.
I'd also spend ten minutes checking whether Thursday is a hard legal date or a target that can be met in part. That single fact is worth more than any scheduling cleverness.
2. On Monday afternoon the team tells you the timescale is impossible. What do you do?
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First, check my own arithmetic rather than the team's attitude: is a bill really double-time, is the sickness confirmed for the whole week, is there a validation step that could be batched or a batch of accounts that doesn't need a bill at all?
If the numbers still don't work, the honest answer to the team is 'you're right, as it stands' - and my job is to change the as-stands, not to push harder. Options in order of preference: reduce scope by issuing what's ready first; borrow two processors from benefits for two days through my manager's manager; authorise limited overtime within policy.
Escalating on Monday with a plan and a specific ask is strong management. Escalating on Thursday afternoon with a missed statutory deadline is not.
I'd tell the team which route I'm pursuing the same day, even if it isn't settled. Uncertainty is far less corrosive than silence, and silence is what allows a team to drift into 'it can't be done, so why try'.