Glossary
What is a delivery path?
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.
The path changes what commitment requires: a fast-track demand takes a light confirmation (owner, expected outcome, target); standard and strategic paths require an agreed capacity figure or a recorded exception; an urgent demand that is not ready ALWAYS requires the exception. One-size rigor fails in both directions — theatre for the small work, rubber-stamping for the large.
The four delivery paths
Fast-track is for small, contained demands — commitment takes a light confirmation: owner, expected outcome, target. Standard is the default for real work: it requires the readiness evidence, including a capacity figure the delivering team agreed to. Strategic is for demands large enough that being wrong is expensive — same bar as standard, applied with the seriousness the stakes deserve. Urgent exception is for demands that cannot wait for readiness: they may be committed early, but only with a recorded exception naming why, what is missing, who accepts the risk, and what would change the decision.
The path is chosen at the decision step, by a person — it is a judgement about how much rigor this demand deserves, not a computation from its size.
Why one-size rigor fails
Apply the full ceremony to everything and the small work suffocates: a two-day fix filling in a dependency register is theatre, and people learn to route around the process — which is how shadow queues are born. Apply a light touch to everything and the large work gets rubber-stamped: a quarter-defining initiative commits on the same one-line confirmation as the fix, and its unexamined unknowns surface in month two.
A delivery path makes the rigor an explicit, recorded choice. The governance question stops being "did we follow the process?" and becomes "did we choose the right level of scrutiny for what this is?" — which is a question someone can actually be accountable for.
Related terms
- 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.
- 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.
- Decision-ready demand — A demand 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.
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.