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Glossary
What is backlog bankruptcy?
The deliberate closure of an oversized backlog by finally making the decisions it contains — each item leaving as a recorded decline with a reason, a park with a review date, or a survivor someone will still argue for out loud.
It is not a purge. A mass delete teaches requesters nothing and the requests come back. A 400-item backlog is 400 unrecorded nos — requests refused in practice without anyone saying so — and bankruptcy converts them into decisions that exist on the record and stay made.
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.