📖 How to use this template

A request queue for shared capacity. Work arrives from somewhere in the business, someone owns it, and you can see at a glance who is carrying what and which department it came from. The sample is a small operations team running three workstreams: Build Production Plan, Recruit Planner and Purchasing.

1. Duplicate this project into your own organization (dropdown next to the project name, then Duplicate)
2. Rename the three sections to your own workstreams and replace the sample requests underneath them
3. Set Requestor on every item. This is the person who asked, which is not the person doing it, and confusing the two is how a request queue turns into an argument.
4. Assign an owner, then set Department so the work can be grouped by where it came from: Engineer, HR or Purchasing
5. Keep %Progress and Current Status current, and use Time tracked to record effort actually spent against each request

Six statuses carry a request end to end: Requested, Approved, In Progress, Under Review, Completed, Cancelled. Requested is where everything lands, and moving something to Approved is the moment someone commits capacity to it.

%Progress is a percentage with colour bands built in: red below 60%, amber to 79%, green at 80% and above. It answers how far along a request is, independent of which stage it sits in.

Current Status is a separate judgement call: Ahead of Schedule, On Schedule, Late, Off Track, Done. Progress says how much is finished. Current Status says whether that is good enough given the time elapsed. A request at 80% can still be Late.

Remarks is where the one-line reason goes when something slips. "Negotiations delay" and "Need approvals" are more useful in a review than any percentage.

Two habits keep the queue honest. Set Requestor at intake rather than later, because a request with no named requester has nobody to go back to when you need to say no. And review Current Status weekly, since it is the only field that will not update itself.