Glossary
What is work intake?
The arrival 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.
Intake collects; it does not decide — deciding is demand management. The common failure is over-building the door: category pickers, priority fields and sizing questions ask the requester to answer things that belong to a later stage, at the exact moment their patience is shortest. Two required questions and visible movement afterwards beat a twelve-field form.
What to ask at intake — and what to leave for later
Ask two things: what needs to change, and either who is affected or what happens if nothing is done. That is the minimum a request needs to be decidable, and it is answerable by someone who does not work in delivery. Everything else — team, priority, size, category, target date — is either a guess the requester cannot make or a decision that belongs to the people who will do the work.
A request that arrives as a bare topic (SSO, reporting, onboarding) is not a small request, it is not a request yet. Holding the bar at the door costs the requester one sentence; recovering the missing sentence three weeks later costs a meeting.
Why the intake form is the wrong place to be thorough
Every extra field is charged at the moment of least patience, to the person with the least context, in exchange for a benefit that accrues to somebody else. Long forms do not produce better requests; they produce fewer requests through the front door and more through the side channel — a DM, a corridor, a meeting — which is where the untracked commitments come from.
The right generosity is on the other side of the door: reply, shape it with the requester, and show them the decision when it is made. A short form followed by visible movement earns more usable input than a thorough form followed by silence.
Related terms
- Demand — A work request that has entered the delivery lifecycle — the unit a delivery governance system tracks from intake to decision.
- 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.
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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