Glossary
What is a delivery commitment?
A delivery commitment is a recorded promise to deliver a stated outcome by a date, made by a named owner with the capacity the delivering teams agreed to give, and kept as a baseline that later results are compared against.
It differs from an estimate, a forecast and a target in one way: somebody else is now planning around it. That is why it needs a record, an owner and a way to be changed in the open.
Commitment, estimate, forecast, target
An estimate is a belief about effort: this will take about four FTE-months. A forecast is a belief about an outcome: at this rate we will be done in March. A target is a wish with a number attached. None of the three is a promise, and all three are routinely heard as one. A delivery commitment is the only one of the four that another team, a customer or a board is entitled to plan around, and it should be the rarest.
The practical test is what happens when it turns out to be wrong. A wrong estimate is revised. A missed forecast is updated. A missed commitment has to be explained to the people who relied on it, which is why it is worth being slow to make one and exact about what it contains.
What a delivery commitment contains
Four things, written down at the moment it is made: the outcome in words the requester would recognise, a named owner, a start and an end date, and the capacity each delivering team has agreed to, in FTE-months. A commitment made before the work was ready carries a fifth: the exception that says why it was made early and who accepted the risk.
The record is the point. Six months later nobody remembers whether the date was "end of Q3" or "September", or whether the reporting API was in scope. A commitment that exists only in a meeting is renegotiated from memory, by whoever remembers it most confidently.
How a delivery commitment ends or changes
A commitment ends with a recorded outcome: delivered, partly delivered or not delivered, and what differed from the promise. It changes through a re-baseline: a new outcome, date or capacity, recorded with the reason, beside the original instead of over it. What it must not do is drift, where the date moves a week at a time in status meetings and the original promise is never formally changed and never formally met.
Related terms
- Delivery governance
Delivery governance is the practice of deciding what to commit to — establishing value, ownership, capacity, dependencies and open questions before people, budget or a date are promised.
- Decision-ready demand
A decision-ready demand is one that can responsibly be committed to: the problem stated apart from the proposed solution, an intended outcome, a named owner, a first capacity figure, the dependencies, and the open questions written down as unknowns.
- Delivery path
A delivery path is the level of rigor a demand takes to commitment — fast-track, standard plan, strategic initiative, or urgent exception — chosen at the decision step, so a small contained demand is not forced through the ceremony a strategic one needs.
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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