Glossary
The vocabulary this product uses, defined plainly. Opinionated where the distinction matters — several of these terms are only useful because of what they exclude.
Turning a request into a decision
- Backlog bankruptcy
Backlog bankruptcy is the deliberate closure of an oversized backlog by finally making the decisions it contains — each item leaving as a recorded decline with a reason, a park with a review date, or a survivor someone will still argue for out loud.
- Clarification brief
A clarification brief is a short artifact that separates what is known from what is assumed from what is still an open question, produced when a raw request is shaped into a demand.
- Demand
A demand is a work request that has entered the delivery lifecycle — the unit a delivery governance system tracks from intake to decision.
- Demand lifecycle
The demand lifecycle is the path a work request takes from arrival to a closed outcome: Capture, Shape, Decide, Plan, Commit, Deliver, Learn — where a demand only walks the stages it needs.
- Demand management
Demand management is the practice of deciding what happens to requested work — shaping raw requests into decidable demands, refusing or parking some on the record, and committing the rest against real capacity.
- Intake
Work intake is the point where work requests enter an organisation, and the bar a request must clear there to become decidable: what needs to change, plus who is affected or why it matters now.
- Shaping
Shaping turns a raw request into something decidable: the problem stated apart from the proposed solution, the intended outcome, what is known versus assumed versus unknown, and a likely owner.
- Slow maybe
A slow maybe is a request that is never refused and never advanced — kept alive by silence, costing the requester repeated follow-ups and the team repeated re-reading, until it dies unrecorded.
- Triage
Request triage is the decision about what happens next to each incoming request, with four recorded exits: plan it, run a time-boxed discovery, park it with a review date, or decline it with a reason.
Deciding what to commit to
- Commitment exception
A commitment exception is a recorded justification required to commit to work that is not yet decision-ready, naming why it is early, what is still unknown, who accepts the risk, and what condition would change the decision.
- Decision-ready demand
A decision-ready demand is one that can responsibly be committed to: the problem stated apart from the proposed solution, an intended outcome, a named owner, a first capacity figure, the dependencies, and the open questions written down as unknowns.
- Definition of ready
A definition of ready is the bar a piece of work must clear before it is accepted — applied at ticket level in Scrum, and far more consequentially at commitment level, before people and a date are promised.
- Delivery commitment
A delivery commitment is a recorded promise to deliver a stated outcome by a date, made by a named owner with the capacity the delivering teams agreed to give, and kept as a baseline that later results are compared against.
- Delivery governance
Delivery governance is the practice of deciding what to commit to — establishing value, ownership, capacity, dependencies and open questions before people, budget or a date are promised.
- Delivery path
A delivery path is the level of rigor a demand takes to commitment — fast-track, standard plan, strategic initiative, or urgent exception — chosen at the decision step, so a small contained demand is not forced through the ceremony a strategic one needs.
- Delivery roadmap
A delivery roadmap is a time-ordered statement of what an organisation intends to deliver — a communication artifact that sequences intentions, distinct from the commitment record that says what was actually promised, by whom, against what capacity.
- MoSCoW prioritisation
MoSCoW prioritisation is a technique that sorts requirements for a fixed timebox into four categories — Must have, Should have, Could have and Won't have this time — so that everyone agrees in advance what is dropped first if time runs short.
- Readiness bar
A readiness bar is the set of things a demand must have before it may be promised: the problem stated apart from the solution, an intended outcome, a named owner, a capacity figure from the delivering team, the dependencies, and the open questions written down.
- RICE scoring
RICE scoring is a prioritisation formula that scores each candidate piece of work as Reach × Impact × Confidence ÷ Effort, so that ideas of different sizes can be compared on expected value per unit of effort.
- Scope creep
Scope creep is the accumulation of unrecorded additions to a commitment's scope — each too small to renegotiate the promise, together large enough to break it.
- WSJF
WSJF (weighted shortest job first) is a sequencing rule that divides each job's cost of delay by its size or duration and does the highest ratio first, so the work that is most expensive to keep waiting per unit of effort goes ahead.
Capacity and what to measure
- Allocation vs consumption
Allocation is what people are committed to; consumption is what they spent. Delivery governance measures allocation and deliberately does not measure consumption.
- Capacity line
A capacity line is a team's honestly available capacity for a period, stated in FTE-months — the constraint that commitments are walked down against, in priority order, until it is spent.
- Capacity planning
Capacity planning establishes what each team can honestly promise for a period — gross FTE-months minus what is already spoken for — and commits demands against that line in priority order.
- FTE-month
An FTE-month is one full-time person working for one month — a capacity unit that is comparable across teams and, where cost is recorded, is the multiplier a cost forecast would use.
- KTLO
KTLO (keep the lights on) is the work a team must do to keep what already exists running — support, on-call, patches, upgrades, renewals and routine operations — as distinct from work that changes what exists.
- Resource allocation
Resource allocation assigns a share of specific people's or teams' capacity to specific work for a defined period — the decision about who gets the capacity, as distinct from the calculation of how much capacity exists.
After the commitment
- Delivery outcome
A delivery outcome is the explicit close of a commitment: what actually shipped, and — when the result is not a clean delivery — what differed from the promise.
- Honest close
An honest close ends a commitment by comparison rather than checkbox: delivered as committed, delivered with named differences, or not delivered — the difference recorded in words whenever the result was not clean.
- RAG status
A RAG status is a traffic-light health signal on delivery — on track, at risk, off track — that is a judgement by the person accountable, not a computation, and is only worth reading when the reasoning comes with it.
- Re-baseline
A re-baseline is a deliberate, recorded change to a delivery commitment: a new outcome, date or capacity, with the reason for the change, kept beside the original baseline instead of overwriting it.
Planning that stays honest
- Horizontal work
Horizontal work is a cross-cutting concern that pulses into several delivery streams at specific gates — security review, legal, compliance, design, accessibility, privacy.
- RACI matrix
A RACI matrix is a grid of tasks or decisions against people or roles, marking for each who is Responsible for doing the work, who is Accountable for the result, who must be Consulted before it happens, and who is Informed afterwards.
- RAID log
A RAID log is a register of the four places delivery surprises come from — risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies — kept so each has demonstrably been looked at, not merely listed.
- Readiness (three-state)
Three-state readiness means a planning dimension has three states, not two: not assessed, assessed and nothing found, and assessed with items.
- Time-boxed discovery
A time-boxed discovery is a deliberate learning step taken instead of a decision: a goal, optionally the questions to answer, a time-box, and a target date on which it must conclude with recorded findings and an explicit decision.
- Vertical work
Vertical work is a delivery stream owned by a single team or discipline that produces end-to-end value within its own lane — frontend, backend, data, mobile, platform.
These definitions come from building DeliverySheet — it takes a vague work request to a clear delivery decision, so the shape, owner, capacity, dependencies and open questions are on the table before anyone commits people or a date.