Step 03

Establish Intake

In Brief — Work is still arriving through every informal channel that existed before governance did. This step establishes one consistent front door for all proposed work — with routing logic that matches request type to the appropriate intake path, and a minimum information standard that captures what the organization needs to make a responsible decision. The front door does not have to be perfect. It has to be the same one for everyone.

What’s Actually Happening

Work is still arriving the same way it always has.

Someone sends an email. Someone stops the right person in a hallway. Someone books a meeting with a title that sounds like a status update and spends the first twenty minutes explaining a new initiative they want to launch next quarter. A vendor relationship produces a proposal that becomes a commitment before anyone has assessed the organizational impact.

None of this goes through a process. Because there is no process. There is a front door that is actually a hundred different front doors, each one used by whoever knew about it, and each one leading to different levels of scrutiny, different approvals, and different expectations about what happens next.

The inventory you built in Step 2 showed you what this produces: a portfolio of work assembled through informal channels, approved through relationships, and tracked inconsistently. Step 3 is about closing most of those doors and building one that works.

Why This Step Exists

Because the quality of every downstream decision depends on the quality of the information that enters the system at intake.

You cannot prioritize work you do not understand. You cannot evaluate a cost-benefit analysis built on assumptions nobody examined. You cannot govern delivery against an outcome that was never defined. Every weak decision downstream traces back to something that was unclear, unstated, or assumed at the moment the work entered the system.

There is a second reason this step exists. Without a consistent front door, governance is applied unevenly. Work with powerful sponsors gets fast-tracked. Work from newer or less connected leaders gets stuck in informal review loops. That unevenness destroys the credibility of any governance model because people can see it. When the process applies to some work and not to other work, the message is that the process is about compliance for some and optional for others.

One door. The same door. For everyone.

What Good Looks Like

Every request for new work enters through a defined, visible process. Not every request gets the same level of scrutiny — different work requires different treatment — but every request enters through the same front door and gets routed appropriately from there.

A person submitting a new initiative knows what information is required, what happens after they submit it, how long the process takes, and what the possible outcomes are. They do not need a relationship with someone in the EPMO to navigate it.

When a new request arrives, the EPMO can answer four questions immediately: What is this? Who is asking and why? Where does it go for review? What does it need before it can be evaluated? If any of those four questions takes more than a day to answer, the intake process is not functioning.

Work that does not meet the minimum information standard does not advance. Returning an incomplete submission with specific guidance on what is missing is not a rejection. It is a service.

How to Do It

Define the minimum information required for any work to be considered. Not the ideal information — the minimum. The fields that, if left blank, make it impossible to make a responsible decision about whether to proceed.

A practical minimum includes: the problem or opportunity being addressed; the expected outcome in measurable terms; who is sponsoring and accountable; urgency and driver (mandatory, time-sensitive, strategic, or discretionary); rough sizing in cost, time, and organizational impact; known dependencies; and — critically — what the organization is choosing not to do if this is approved.

That last field is the one most organizations skip. It is also the one that forces the most honest thinking. Every approval is a choice. Making that tradeoff explicit at intake changes the quality of the conversation.

Build routing logic that matches the nature of the work:

Fast-Track

Mandatory, regulatory, legal, or compliance-driven. Gets a shorter intake and a direct path to authorization without the full evaluation required for discretionary work.

Standard

Operational improvements and moderate-sized discretionary investments. Full intake with full evaluation.

Strategic

Significant investment, cross-functional impact, or connection to organizational priority. Full intake plus executive review.

Emergency

Urgent operational need that cannot wait for a standard cycle. Expedited intake with a commitment to full documentation within a defined window afterward.

Discovery

Work that needs further definition before it can be evaluated. A defined period to build the case, with a deadline.

Three roles interact with the intake process in ways that deserve specific design attention. The Business Analyst is often best positioned to help submitters prepare their intake materials — they bridge between what a sponsor wants to say and what the governance forum needs to hear. The Product Owner submits work that does not always fit a project-based intake model; build a path for product work that captures the relevant information without forcing it into a structure it was never designed for. The Product Manager operates at the roadmap level; their intake needs to reflect strategic intent and outcome continuity, not just the next feature set.

What Breaks When You Skip It

The portfolio continues to grow through informal channels while the formal governance model operates on partial information. New tools get selected through vendor relationships. New initiatives get funded through budget conversations that happen outside the governance cycle.

The EPMO becomes reactive. It manages what was already approved rather than improving how approvals happen. The governance model produces reports on work it did not shape, tracks outcomes it had no role in defining, and measures against baselines that were never established.

The portfolio reflects who has access, not what the organization actually needs.

The Gotchas

The form becomes the process. Intake exists to improve the quality of decisions, not to produce completed forms. When the EPMO starts tracking form submission rates instead of decision quality, the form has replaced the purpose.

Senior sponsors bypass the process. This will happen. The response is not to chase them down with the form — it is to make the process useful enough that bypassing it carries a cost. Document the outcomes of work that skips intake. Use them.

Intake becomes a gatekeeping reputation. If people experience the intake process as the place where ideas go to die, they will route around it. When submitters say the intake process helped them clarify their thinking, the reputation shifts.

The minimum standard drifts upward. The natural tendency is to add fields. Review the form regularly. If a field is not actively improving decisions, remove it.

Where the Disciplines Show Up

→ Decision Discipline: Intake is where decision rights become concrete. Who can submit? Who reviews? Who routes? Who has authority to fast-track? These questions need explicit answers before intake functions, not after. The EPMO also needs a documented policy on what happens to submissions that arrive outside the formal channel.

→ Change & Absorption: The intake form should ask about organizational impact and change load from the moment work enters the system. Change saturation is a portfolio risk. It starts at the front door.

→ Enterprise Fit: Architecture review, data and security flags, integration dependencies — these are intake-level questions, not tollgate surprises. A field that asks “are there known technology, data, or security considerations?” catches issues early.

→ Evidence: What do we know, and what are we assuming? Every intake submission contains both. Naming the assumptions at intake creates a testable hypothesis. Leaving them unstated creates a future surprise.

→ Political: The intake process creates a new power dynamic: for the first time, work cannot enter the portfolio through informal channels without leaving a record. At this step, political discipline means designing intake so that it does not feel like exclusion to the powerful, even while requiring the same rigor from everyone. The practitioner who positions intake as a service — “we want to help you make the strongest possible case” — has a different conversation than the one who positions it as a gate.

The Key
Intake must improve the decision, not merely collect information. After a submission goes through intake, does the organization have what it needs to make a responsible decision? If yes, intake worked. If the governance forum still has to ask basic questions about what the work is, intake failed — regardless of whether the form was completed.

You know this step is working when people submitting requests stop asking “what do you need from me?” They already know. The second signal: clarification requests from the EPMO drop.

The Artifacts

T1 — Intake Form

The minimum required fields in plain language, with brief guidance on what a good answer looks like for each. Should fit on a single page or screen. The form is not the process; it is the starting point for a conversation.

T15 — Intake Routing Guide

A one-page decision tree that routes each submission to the appropriate review path based on category, urgency, and size. This document answers “what happens after I submit?” and should be visible to anyone who submits work.

T16 — Minimum Information Standard

Defines what constitutes a complete submission and what happens to an incomplete one. States clearly that incomplete submissions are returned, not held, and that the review cycle clock starts when the submission is complete.