Glossary
The vocabulary this product uses, defined plainly. Opinionated where the distinction matters — several of these terms are only useful because of what they exclude.
- 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.
- FTE-month
One full-time person working for one month — a capacity unit that is comparable across teams and converts directly into a cost forecast.
Unlike story points, which are deliberately team-local and have no monetary meaning, FTE-months can be summed across teams and multiplied by a monthly cost. They are coarse on purpose: the granularity broadcasts its own error bar.
- 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.
Verticals run in parallel with each other and consume capacity continuously, as a rate: this team, this fraction, these months.
- Horizontal work
A cross-cutting concern that pulses into several delivery streams at specific gates — security review, legal, compliance, design, accessibility, privacy.
A horizontal is rarely a standalone deliverable; its function is to gate other teams’ progress. Its load is driven by other people’s schedules, which is why several streams reaching the same gate in the same fortnight is the most predictable "surprise" bottleneck in delivery.
- 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.
- Allocation vs consumption
Allocation is what people are committed to; consumption is what they spent. Delivery governance measures allocation and deliberately does not measure consumption.
Allocation answers the questions a manager is accountable for and stays accurate when watched. Consumption — hours logged, per-person completion rates, velocity — stops being accurate the moment people know it is being read.
- 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.
The split matters because a request written in one confident voice makes an assumption indistinguishable from a fact, and every downstream estimate then inherits it. The assumptions list is also a risk register before you have one.
- Readiness (three-state)
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.
- Delivery outcome
The explicit close of a commitment: what actually shipped, and — when the result is not a clean delivery — what differed from the promise.
Tracking means delivery is happening; the outcome means it is closed. A demand is only complete once the outcome is recorded and a lesson has been written.
- 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.
It is distinct from project management, which runs work already committed to, and from task tracking, which records work already planned. Most missed dates are decided at this layer, not during delivery.
These definitions come 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.