Glossary
What is request triage?
The decision about what happens next to each incoming request, with four recorded exits: plan it, run a time-boxed discovery, park it with a review date, or decline it with a reason.
The test for real triage is that a request cannot leave the step still undecided. What most teams run instead is sorting — a weekly meeting that re-orders the queue, assigns labels and decides nothing, so the same items return every week. Deciding is faster than sorting: a recorded park or decline never comes back next week; a sorted item always does.
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.