When a team is over-committed, say which thing slips

A team is carrying six FTE-months of committed work and has four. Everyone in the room can see it. The meeting ends with "let's see how we go".

That sentence is the decision. It is just an undocumented one, and what it actually decides is that the shortfall will be absorbed by people rather than by the plan.

The three responses that are true

There are exactly three honest moves, and all of them are visible:

• Remove something. A named commitment comes out of the quarter.
• Move a date. A named commitment lands later.
• Reduce scope on a named item. Not "trim everywhere" — one thing, specifically, gets smaller.

Whichever you pick, one more step is not optional: the person who was promised the affected work has to be told, by you, before they notice. A re-plan the stakeholder learns about in week ten is not a re-plan, it is a broken promise with extra steps.

The four responses that aren't

Effort. "The team will push." This works for about two weeks and is borrowed, not created. What it buys in delivery it takes out of review depth, testing and the small maintenance nobody logs — so the capacity problem becomes a quality problem, which surfaces later, costs more, and is no longer traceable to the decision that caused it.

Re-estimating downward. The work did not get smaller because the plan needs it to be. This is the most damaging option, because it corrupts the one instrument you have: a team that learns estimates get negotiated will pad every future one, and you lose the ability to plan at all.

Trimming everything by 20%. Spreads the shortfall across every commitment so that all of them are slightly late and none of them is a decision anyone made. Six mild disappointments instead of one honest conversation.

Waiting. Hoping something gets cancelled. Sometimes it does. The cost is that everyone spends the quarter working on things they suspect are not real, which is corrosive in a way that shows up in retention long before it shows up in delivery.

Why it feels impossible

Two reasons, and they are worth naming because they are structural rather than personal.

Each commitment was agreed separately. Nobody ever said yes to the total; they said yes five times, each of which was individually reasonable. There is no meeting where the sixth yes was visibly the one that broke it, so there is no obvious thing to take back.

Removing something means going back on a promise, and adding something did not feel like making one. The asymmetry is entirely in the visibility. Adding is a conversation; removing is an admission.

Both dissolve if commitments are recorded individually with the capacity each one consumes. Then the total is derived rather than discovered, and the fifth yes is visibly the one that requires a no somewhere else — at the moment it is being made, not in week seven.

Say it early and specifically

The instinct is to wait until you are certain. That instinct is wrong here, because the value of the warning decays fast: a stakeholder told in week two can re-plan around it, and one told in week ten can only be disappointed.

Specific also beats hedged. "We are at risk on the reporting work" invites reassurance. "The reporting work will land three weeks late unless we drop the migration; I need a decision by Friday" invites a decision — and hands it to the person who should be making it, which is usually not you.

The part that pays back next quarter

Handling it visibly once changes what happens the next time. A team that has seen an over-commitment resolved by removing a named item — rather than by quietly working weekends — gives you honest estimates afterwards, because honesty stopped being punished.

That is the whole return on this. Not the one quarter you rescued: the estimates you can still trust in the four that follow.

How DeliverySheet surfaces it

Capacity is committed per craft with the team's own figure and confidence, and the committed-capacity report rolls it up by craft across the portfolio — so "where is our committed effort concentrated" is a question with an answer rather than a feeling. The total on any commitment is derived from its per-team rows, so it cannot quietly exceed what the teams actually agreed to.

Changing a commitment is a re-baseline, not an edit: capacity is re-agreed per team and the change is recorded with its reason, so the commitment ledger shows the original alongside what it became. That record is what makes an over-commitment conversation possible with evidence instead of memory — and it is the same machinery behind planning a quarter you can defend .