[Checklist] What Happens Before the Work Starts
Triage, alignment, and demand planning. A checklist for VPs and Heads of Learning.
Most operational problems in a learning function get diagnosed as capacity problems when they are really intake problems. By the time a project reaches production, the decisions that determined its outcome have already been made: whether to take it at all, what business result it is attached to, and whether anyone saw it coming. Those decisions happen in minutes, usually without a process.
Below are seven things worth examining at the front of your pipeline rather than the back.
Triage
1. Separate your response time from your decision time
Stakeholders form their view of L&D on how quickly they hear back, not on how quickly you deliver.
A request that sits eleven days without acknowledgement teaches that person to route around intake next time, and they tell colleagues.
Run two clocks: acknowledgement inside 48 hours, decision inside a stated window. The first costs almost nothing and it is the one protecting your front door.
2. Sort requests by decision type before you sort them by size
Most intake forms open by asking how big the request is. The more useful first question is what kind of decision it represents.
Four buckets cover nearly everything: not a learning problem, route it elsewhere; already exists, point them to it; small and standard, run it through a template; genuinely new, book a consultation. Only the fourth warrants an alignment conversation.
Teams that skip this step spend their most experienced people triaging work a routing rule should have handled.
3. Track the share of requests you redirect or decline
If that number is zero, you have a queue rather than a triage function.
In most organizations a meaningful share of incoming requests are performance problems that training cannot fix, or duplicates of assets that already exist.
Publishing the figure does two things. It shows that capacity is being protected deliberately, and it gives your team explicit permission to say no. Both are hard to establish retroactively.
Alignment
4. Require a business metric on the request, not a strategic pillar
Mapping a program to “Operational Excellence” is decoration. Mapping it to “reduce claim reprocessing from 8% to 5% by Q3” is a commitment, and it changes how the program gets designed. Then ask whose number it is.
Requests usually arrive from someone adjacent to the outcome rather than the executive who owns it, and a program without that person attached has nobody to answer for it when measurement time comes.
5. Ask what happens if this doesn’t get built
Nearly every intake form asks for the objective. Very few ask for the cost of doing nothing.
It is the fastest way to separate a priority from a preference, and it lets a requester withdraw gracefully when the honest answer is “not much.” When the answer is specific and expensive, you have both a justification for the work and the opening line of your impact case.
Demand Planning
6. Require a business metric on the request, not a strategic pillar
Request volume is a lagging indicator.
The leading indicators sit elsewhere in the organization: the product roadmap, the systems implementation schedule, the regulatory calendar, the M&A pipeline, and above all the hiring plan.
A headcount plan showing 400 new commercial hires next fiscal year is an onboarding demand signal six months before anyone submits a ticket.
Reading those documents each quarter is unglamorous work that separates forecasting from reacting.
7. Commit to less than your capacity, and name the remainder
Teams that allocate 100% of forecast capacity have no room for the urgent thing that will certainly arrive. Commit somewhere around 70 to 80% and label the rest as reserve. Naming it is what matters.
Unallocated capacity that has not been declared as reserve gets absorbed invisibly, and then everything runs late at once with no explanation you can point to.
A Closing Test
Can you produce, on one page, the share of last year’s delivery capacity that went to each of your company’s stated priorities? Most functions have never built that view.
The ones that do usually find compliance and onboarding consumed the majority while the stated top priority received a fraction. That chart tends to change the budget conversation permanently.
