DeliverySheet vs a spreadsheet

The sheet is not the problem — the missing states are

Every engineering manager's intake sheet has the same columns: request, team, size, quarter, status. The columns are fine. What the sheet cannot represent is the difference between the rows: a demand that is understood but not ready, one that was committed early with a recorded reason, one whose "no known risks" means someone looked, and one whose blank means nobody did. In a sheet those four look identical — a row with words in it.

That distinction is the entire job of a governance layer. On the standard path, a demand in DeliverySheet cannot reach "committed" without an owner, a problem distinct from the requester's preferred solution, a capacity figure the delivering team agreed to, and its open questions written down — or a recorded exception naming who accepted the gap and why. (Deliberately small demands take a lighter confirm; the rigor follows the delivery path.)

What the sheet silently loses

• The decision record. A sheet overwrites; every edit is the new truth. Closure saves in DeliverySheet are version-guarded, and re-baselining a commitment keeps the old baseline and the reason.
• The distinction between fact and assumption. One confident cell makes an assumption look like a fact, and every downstream estimate inherits it. Shaping separates known / assumed / unknown before anyone commits.
• The refusal. A sheet has no way to say no — requests just stop being updated. Parking and declining are recorded decisions with a reason, so a "no" survives the person who made it.
• The close. "Done" in a sheet is a word. A delivery outcome here requires what shipped and — when it differed from the promise — what differed, plus a lesson before the demand counts as complete.

Where the sheet wins, honestly

Flexibility, zero learning curve, zero cost, and everyone already has it open. DeliverySheet deliberately has no custom fields and no configurable stages, so if your process genuinely needs a bespoke column per team, the sheet — for that — is better. The trade is one-way: the sheet's flexibility is exactly why its contents stop being trustworthy the first time someone is motivated to bend them.