Glossary
What is three-state readiness?
A planning dimension has three states, not two: not assessed, assessed and nothing found, and assessed with items.
Collapsing "assessed, nothing found" into "empty" makes an honest blank indistinguishable from a skipped step, so people invent dependencies and risks to look diligent. Invented entries are worse than blanks: they consume review attention and make the register look trustworthy when it is not.
Related terms
- Vertical work — 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.
- Horizontal work — A cross-cutting concern that pulses into several delivery streams at specific gates — security review, legal, compliance, design, accessibility, privacy.
- Time-boxed discovery — 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.
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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