Glossary
What is a demand?
A work request that has entered the delivery lifecycle — the unit a delivery governance system tracks from intake to decision.
A demand is distinct from a task: a task is work to do, a demand is a request that has not yet earned a commitment. It carries the problem, the intended outcome, an owner, and the open questions that would change the answer.
Demand vs request vs ticket
A request is what someone says: a sentence, usually naming a solution rather than a problem. A demand is that request once it has entered a lifecycle and become the unit a decision will be made about — it has a problem statement, an intended outcome, an owner and a set of open questions. A ticket is what exists after the decision: a unit of work to be executed, tracked in an execution tool.
Collapsing the three is the common mistake. A request filed straight as a ticket has skipped the decision entirely — the work is now scheduled, and the question of whether it should have been is unaskable without looking like obstruction.
What a demand has to carry to be decided on
Six things, and a request contains none of them: the problem as distinct from the solution someone already has in mind, the outcome that would count as success, one named owner, a capacity figure the delivering team actually agreed to, the dependencies, and the open questions written down rather than assumed away.
The last one does most of the work. A request written in one confident voice makes an assumption indistinguishable from a fact, and every estimate downstream inherits it. Separating what is known from what is assumed from what is unknown is the cheapest thing that can be done to a demand and the one most often skipped.
Related terms
- Clarification brief — 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 management — 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.
- Demand lifecycle — 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.
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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