Glossary
What is work intake?
The arrival point where work requests enter an organisation, and the bar a request must clear there to become decidable: what needs to change, plus who is affected or why it matters now.
Intake collects; it does not decide — deciding is demand management. The common failure is over-building the door: category pickers, priority fields and sizing questions ask the requester to answer things that belong to a later stage, at the exact moment their patience is shortest. Two required questions and visible movement afterwards beat a twelve-field form.
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.