Glossary
What is a 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.
The bar's power is its position — before the commitment, not after — and its honesty valve: it can be crossed early, but only with a recorded exception naming what is missing and who accepts the risk. A bar that cannot be crossed gets routed around; one that can be crossed silently is decoration.
Readiness bar vs approval gate
An approval gate is permission: a person or a board says yes, and the work proceeds. What it checks depends on who is in the room that day, and the record it leaves is usually a name and a date. A readiness bar is evidence: a fixed list anyone can check, applied the same way to every demand, whose answers stay attached to the work after the meeting ends.
The two can coexist — someone still has to say yes — but the bar changes what the yes is based on. A gate without a bar approves the presentation; a gate with a bar approves the demand.
Setting the bar at the right height
Too high and it gets routed around: people commit in a meeting and enter the work afterwards, so the bar measures a process most commitments never went through. Too low and it is decoration. The six items — problem, outcome, owner, a capacity figure from the delivering team, dependencies and open questions — are the floor for work that is large enough to be expensive when wrong. Small, contained work can reasonably clear a lighter bar, such as an owner, an expected outcome and a target, as long as choosing the lighter path is itself a recorded decision.
Calibrate it with outcomes, not opinions. At quarter end, compare commitments that cleared the bar with those that crossed it by exception. If the ready ones miss just as often, the bar is checking the wrong things.
Common mistakes
Adding an item after every miss until nobody can clear the bar honestly. Allowing it to be crossed silently, which makes it decoration. And checking presence rather than content: an owner field containing a team name, or a capacity field containing the requester's guess, is filled in but not ready.
Related terms
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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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