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Intake Capacity Checklist

Pre-acceptance job aid — instantiates Overcommitment Prevention

Forces every proposed commitment to have its scope, cost, displacement, and owner pinned down before anyone can say yes.

Intake Capacity Checklist is a required job aid run against each individual proposed commitment at the moment of intake. It refuses to let a request be accepted until a short set of questions is answered: what exactly is being promised (scope, deadline, dependencies), what it displaces, and who will own it. Its distinguishing move is operating at the item level and forcing the vagueness out before acceptance — it makes an unspecified promise un-acceptable. It supplies no capacity number and no authority beyond that gate; its power is refusing the "sure, we'll figure it out later" yes that is the most common on-ramp to overload.

Example

An in-house legal team keeps getting pulled into new matters by hallway asks. They install an intake checklist: no matter opens until (1) scope, deadline, and dependencies are written down; (2) the requester names what existing work it displaces; and (3) a named attorney owns it. A VP asks the team to "handle the vendor thing by Friday." Run through the checklist, "the vendor thing" resolves into a ≈40-hour contract review with a hard regulatory dependency, displacing the acquisition NDA due the same Friday, and nobody free to own it. The checklist decides nothing — but the real shape and cost of the ask are now on the table, and the easy Friday yes has become an honest, visible trade.

How it works

The signature is a mandatory pre-acceptance interrogation of terms, displacement, and owner: an item that cannot answer cannot enter. The checklist does not rank requests or compute total capacity. It converts a fuzzy promise into a specified, owned, cost-attached one, so that the rest of the archetype's machinery — the limit, the ledger, the gate — has a well-formed commitment to act on rather than a rumor.

Tuning parameters

  • Checklist length — a few gating questions versus a thorough form. Longer catches more but invites bypass under pressure.
  • Gating strictness — advisory versus a hard block on acceptance. Advisory is frictionless but toothless; hard-gating is the whole point — a checklist with no authority prevents nothing.
  • Owner requirement — must a named individual accept, or is a team enough. Naming an individual prevents diffusion but can bottleneck.
  • Opportunity-cost depth — name any displacement versus quantify it. Deeper makes the trade vivid but slows intake.
  • Trigger scope — which requests must run it (all, or above a size threshold). Universal is fair but heavy; thresholded is efficient but leaks the small-but-many asks.

When it helps, and when it misleads

Its strength is killing the most common overcommitment path — the vague verbal yes that no one specified, costed, or owned — by making specification a precondition. Like the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist, its value is forcing a few non-negotiable checks before an irreversible step, catching predictable omissions rather than exotic ones.[1] Its limit is that it is per-item: it guarantees each commitment is well-formed and owned, but says nothing about whether the sum fits — a team can accept many perfectly-specified commitments and still be overloaded. The classic misuse is running it as box-ticking with no power to stop acceptance, or backfilling it after the yes to look diligent. The discipline is to give it real gating authority and keep it short enough that people actually use it under pressure.

How it implements the components

Intake Capacity Checklist realizes the item-shaping side of the archetype:

  • commitment_terms — forces scope, deadline, dependencies, and assumptions to be written before acceptance, making the promise countable and renegotiable.
  • opportunity_cost_review — requires the requester to name what the new commitment displaces, so saying yes is visibly costly.
  • commitment_owner — requires a named owner accountable for the commitment before it can enter.

It shapes each item but does not measure capacity (Calendar Capacity Audit), cap total load (Commitment Budget), or run the portfolio-level accept/defer decision (Portfolio Intake Gate).

  • Instantiates: Overcommitment Prevention — it produces the well-formed, owned commitment that everything downstream can count and check.
  • Sibling mechanisms: Commitment Budget · Portfolio Intake Gate · Backlog Commitment Review · Commitment Burndown Review · Capacity Dashboard · Calendar Capacity Audit · Budget Encumbrance Control · Renegotiation Notice Protocol · Sales Capacity Alignment Review · Work-in-Progress Cap

References

[1] The WHO Surgical Safety Checklist works not by adding expertise but by forcing a few critical verifications before an irreversible action, catching predictable omissions. An intake checklist does the same for commitments — the risk it guards against is not exotic, it is the routine unspecified, unowned yes. ↩