BAMML Executive Insights
Your Entity Cannot Hire Its Way Out of a Capacity Problem
When a public entity falls behind on its mandate, the diagnosis is almost always the same: we are short-staffed, and we cannot fill posts because of the compensation ceiling.
Sometimes that is exactly right. Often it is the visible half of a problem whose other half never gets measured.
What is actually happening
A vacancy is a very legible problem. It has a number, a post, a job description and a rand value. It appears in reports. It can be escalated. The solution is obvious and requires only permission and money.
Consumed capacity is illegible. Time lost to rework, to a process with more approval steps than it needs, to information that has to be reassembled because it was never captured properly, to meetings that exist to coordinate work that should not need coordinating — none of that appears anywhere. There is no line item called capacity lost to process.
So an entity can be simultaneously short of people and wasting a meaningful share of the people it already has, and only one of those two facts is visible to anyone.
There is a second pattern underneath it. Where posts are filled, they are often filled against a structure designed for work the entity no longer does in the way it used to. The post exists because it existed. The recruitment replaces the post rather than reconsidering the capability. You end up correctly filling a vacancy that was not the capability you actually needed.
Why it matters
Filling a post against a ceiling is expensive, slow, and permanent. It is the most constrained resource an entity has, and it should therefore be the most carefully targeted.
Where the real constraint is process, adding people produces a smaller improvement than expected — and sometimes none. More people in a process with an unnecessary approval loop generates more items waiting in that loop. The bottleneck does not move because the bottleneck was never headcount.
That produces a corrosive pattern: the entity argues hard for posts, gets some, does not improve much, and finds its next request treated with more scepticism. The credibility spent on the first request is not available for the second.
The entities that make progress tend to separate the two questions before they ask for anything. Where is capacity going? And separately, where is capability genuinely missing?
The Integrated View
| Discipline | The question | Why it is usually skipped |
|---|---|---|
| Workforce Governance | What capability do we actually need, as opposed to which posts are vacant? | The structure is inherited, not reviewed |
| Operational Performance | How much existing capacity is consumed by rework, approvals and reassembly? | Nobody measures it, so it does not exist |
| Financial Governance | What is the cost of the capacity we are losing, versus the cost of the posts we want? | The first number has never been calculated |
| Risk & Compliance | Are approval layers adding control, or only adding time? | Removing a step feels like weakening control |
| Executive Decision Intelligence | Do we have evidence for the case we are making? | The vacancy number is available and the other number is not |
That last row explains the behaviour completely. Executives argue the vacancy case because it is the case they can evidence. Not because they believe it is the whole story.
What good looks like
Before the next motivation for posts, do three things.
Measure where time actually goes in one core process. Not a survey of opinions — follow a sample of real transactions from start to finish and record elapsed time against active time. The gap between the two is almost always larger than anyone expects, and it is the gap, not the active time, where capacity is lost.
Separate the capability question from the post question. Ask what the entity needs to be able to do, then ask which of those capabilities is genuinely absent. Some vacancies are for capability you no longer require. Some capability gaps have no corresponding post at all.
Then make a combined case. Here is the capacity we will release by fixing these specific steps. Here is the capability we cannot create internally, and what it will cost. That case is far more persuasive than a vacancy schedule, precisely because it demonstrates the entity has examined itself first.
What to do on Monday
- Pick one core process. Follow ten real transactions end to end. Record elapsed time and active time separately.
- Count the approval steps, and for each ask what it prevents. Steps that prevent nothing are pure cost.
- Identify rework. How often does work return because information was incomplete the first time?
- List capabilities, not posts. What must this entity be able to do? Which of those can nobody here currently do?
- Build the combined case — capacity released plus capability required — before requesting anything.
The vacancy schedule will still be part of the argument. It should just no longer be the whole of it.
