Project Intake & Approvals

Project intake is the process of capturing, evaluating, and prioritizing project requests before any are approved and resourced. It keeps an organization working on its most valuable initiatives rather than every request that arrives. SmartSuite routes all requests through one form and one approval workflow, so each is judged on the same criteria and lands in the portfolio already linked to the strategy it supports.

Intake forms collect objectives, expected value, cost, and resource needs as required fields, with conditional sections that appear for particular request types or departments. Every submission arrives complete and comparable. Requesters fill in one form and the PMO stops chasing missing details.

Scoring models are formula fields that combine criteria such as strategic alignment, business value, cost, and risk into a single score. Each request is scored the same way and sorted against the others on a grid or dashboard. Reviewers compare requests on evidence and record their decision on the record.

Approval workflows are automations that route a request to the right approvers based on rules such as budget size or department, with conditions, escalations, and notifications at each step. Approvers act from the record or the notification. The whole chain is logged in Activity History, so governance is enforced without slowing decisions.

Once approved, a request becomes the starting record for a portfolio item, program, or project, and the intake data travels with it. Approved initiatives link to portfolio priorities and resource plans, so nothing is re-entered. Teams can trace any project back to the request that justified it.

Incoming requests carry estimated effort, and rollups compare the total against the capacity recorded in Resource Management. Dashboards show demand against available capacity by team and period. Approvers see whether the organization can absorb a new initiative before they commit to it.

Yes. Requests link to the objectives and key results they support, and alignment can be a weighted input to the score. Leaders can group the pipeline by objective to see which goals have demand behind them and which do not. Approved work then starts tied to the OKR it serves.

All requests sit in one table with the same evaluation criteria, so leaders compare initiatives and trade-offs from a single view. Approval rules run the same way for every request, and every decision is recorded on the record. Over time, demand management becomes a disciplined, auditable process rather than a series of one-off calls.