When Two Teams Book the Same Person for the Same Week

Two managers plan two different projects. Both need the same engineer in week eleven. Neither knows about the other, because each plan looks complete from the inside. The problem surfaces on the Monday of week eleven, when it is far too late to solve.

Double allocation is a planning failure, not a people failure. Catching it early means making one person's commitments visible in one place, and deciding in advance who breaks the tie.

Why it stays invisible

Each plan is internally correct. Manager A checked their own board and the engineer was free. Manager B did the same. Nothing in either view showed the other booking, so nothing looked wrong.

Three things keep it hidden:

• Plans live per project, not per person. Most boards answer "what does this project need" and never "what is this person already promised to".
• Soft commitments do not get recorded. A hallway conversation in March creates a real expectation for June and leaves no trace.
• Leave sits in a different system. Even a perfectly coordinated pair of managers can both book someone who is on approved holiday, because neither plan can see the leave calendar, the same reason an HR leave calendar and a project board end up disagreeing.

The third one is the most common and the most annoying, because the information existed. It was just somewhere else.

Double allocation is invisible because plans are organised by project and availability is organised by person. Until one view shows both, the collision only appears when the week arrives.

Catching it at planning time

You need one view, per person, that shows every commitment on them: project work, approved leave, and anything already promised informally.

Practical steps that work even in a simple setup:

1. Plan at the person level once per cycle. After both projects are planned, run a pass that lists people, not tasks, and check for anyone appearing twice in the same week.

2. Record soft bookings. If you have asked for someone's time, write it down as a provisional claim with an expiry date. Unrecorded intentions are the main source of collisions.

3. Pull leave into the same view. Approved absence should sit next to allocations, not in a separate calendar that planning never opens.

4. Look four to six weeks out, weekly. Collisions found a month early are a conversation. Collisions found on the day are an escalation.

This is the practical case for keeping project management and people records on one set of records. When the board already knows who is on leave and who is allocated where, a clash shows up while it is still cheap to fix. SicherOne is built around that overlap for exactly this reason: the planning view and the availability view are the same view.

Who decides when both managers say critical

They will both say critical, because from where each of them sits, it is. The tie needs a rule agreed before the argument, not a debate during it.

Rules that hold up:

• Committed external dates beat internal ones. A promise to a customer or a regulator outranks an internal milestone.
• The earlier recorded claim wins by default. Not because it is more important, but because it removes the incentive to keep bookings quiet.
• The person with the smaller substitution cost gives way. If one project can swap in someone else with two days of handover and the other cannot, the answer is arithmetic, and knowing who can swap in is what a skills matrix that stays current is for.
• If it is still a tie, one named person decides. A programme lead, a delivery lead, whoever. The name matters more than the title. An unowned tie becomes a week of email.

Write these four lines down once and reuse them. Most collisions resolve at line one or line three.

What to record after you resolve it

The resolution is worth more than the argument if you capture it.

• Which project gave way, and what it cost in days
• What the substitute arrangement was, if there was one
• Whether the clash came from an unrecorded soft booking, from leave, or from genuine over-commitment

After a quarter, that short log tells you something useful. If most clashes trace back to unrecorded bookings, fix the recording habit. If most trace back to leave, connect the calendars. If most are genuine over-commitment on the same two or three names, you do not have a planning problem. You have a staffing problem wearing a planning problem's clothes, and the next hire only helps if what recruiting already learned reaches the manager before the first sprint.

The check to run this week

Take the next six weeks. List every person allocated to more than one project. Then ask each of those people what else they have been asked to do that is not on any board. The gap between those two answers is the size of your invisible allocation, and it is usually larger than the plan admits.