The “Telephone Game” of Project Initiation: Eliminating Vague Hand-Offs Between Teams

The telephone game begins when each team replaces the request instead of adding what it learned.

Keep the original witness

Record the first description, affected person, example, and owner in software project intake. Account management, operations, product, and engineering may add context. They may not erase the source.

The operating boundary is in stop hiring a project office to translate intake, and the full delivery path is in how to move software requests without a translator. This page stays at the initiation handoff, where the first paraphrase usually puts on a lanyard and becomes official.

Define ready in facts

Before work begins, require a retellable current state, measurable consequence, desired outcome, reachable owner, answered critical questions, known constraints, and a recorded decision.

On one project, QA tested a rewritten ticket perfectly while the customer’s actual exception remained broken. The handoff had become the product.

Add, do not translate

Use requirements gathering software for each team’s questions and answers. Use the free Project Intake Evaluation Worksheet to check whether approved work keeps the original request attached.