Glossary
What is a commitment exception?
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.
The point is not to prevent early commitments — real deadlines exist — but to make them countable. At quarter end you can then ask whether the misses came from early commitments or from a readiness bar that is set wrong.
The four fields, and why each one is load-bearing
Why now: the deadline, the dependency or the commercial reason that makes waiting more expensive than committing blind. Written down, it is checkable later; unwritten, every early commitment retroactively becomes "we had no choice". What is missing: the specific unresolved thing — an unestimated craft, an unowned dependency, an unanswered question — so the gap is a work item rather than a feeling.
Who accepts the risk: a named person, not a team and not "the business", because a risk owned by everyone is owned by nobody when it lands. And what would change the decision: the condition under which this becomes a normal commitment or gets pulled — the only field that turns an exception into something you can act on before the quarter ends.
Why banning early commitments makes it worse
A ban does not remove the pressure that produces early commitments; it removes the record of them. The promise still gets made, in a meeting or a thread, and it enters delivery indistinguishable from work that cleared the bar. The organisation then measures a readiness process that most of its real commitments never went through.
Requiring four fields costs a minute and inverts that. Early commitments stay possible, become visible, and — because they are countable — can be compared against ready ones at quarter end. If the ready ones miss just as often, the bar is wrong, and that is worth knowing.
Related terms
- Delivery governance — The practice of deciding what to commit to — establishing value, ownership, capacity, dependencies and open questions before people, budget or a date are promised.
- Decision-ready demand — A demand 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.
- Delivery path — 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.
This definition comes 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.
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