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Glossary
What is the demand lifecycle?
The path a work request takes from arrival to a closed outcome: Capture, Shape, Decide, Plan, Commit, Deliver, Learn — where a demand only walks the stages it needs.
The stages exist to place the expensive questions early: shaping before deciding, readiness before committing, an honest close before the lesson. A small demand can skip planning ceremony entirely; what no demand skips is the decision and the close.
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.