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Free Project Intake Form Template for PMOs and Agency Teams
A project intake form standardizes how work enters your pipeline. Instead of requests arriving through email, Slack, or hallway conversations — each with different levels of detail — every potential project goes through the same structured submission. This template is built for PMOs managing demand from multiple departments and agencies handling client project requests. It gives you consistent information for prioritization, prevents incomplete requests from consuming review time, and creates an audit trail of what was requested and when.
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What this template includes
- Requester name, department, and contact information
- Project name and brief description (limited to 200 words to force clarity)
- Business justification and expected outcomes with measurable success criteria
- Requested start date and target completion date
- Estimated budget range or resource needs (FTE, external spend)
- Priority level and urgency indicators with definitions
- Alignment to strategic objectives (dropdown or scoring field)
- Known risks, dependencies, or constraints
- Approval workflow section with routing rules
- PMO review and scoring fields (strategic fit, resource availability, complexity, value)
When to use it
- When your PMO receives project requests from multiple departments and needs a consistent way to compare them
- When stakeholders submit incomplete or unclear requests that waste review committee time
- When you need an audit trail of what was requested, by whom, and when — for governance and capacity planning
- When transitioning from ad-hoc request handling to a formal intake process with defined SLAs
- When an agency needs to standardize how client project requests are captured before scoping begins
- When demand exceeds capacity and you need objective criteria to prioritize which projects proceed
How to use it
- 1Distribute the form to all potential requesters — department heads, business owners, client contacts, and stakeholders who initiate work.
- 2Require completion of all mandatory fields before submission. Incomplete forms get returned with specific guidance on what is missing.
- 3Route completed forms to your PMO or review committee on a regular cadence — weekly for high-volume PMOs, bi-weekly for smaller teams.
- 4Score each request against your prioritization criteria: strategic alignment (does it support stated objectives?), resource availability (can we staff it?), urgency (what happens if we wait?), and expected value (what is the return?).
- 5Communicate decisions back to requesters within a defined SLA — approved, deferred to next quarter, or declined with documented reasoning.
- 6For approved requests, the intake form becomes the seed for your project charter. Transfer the business case, objectives, and constraints directly.
Example in practice
A corporate PMO receives 8-12 project requests per month from 5 departments. Each request comes through this intake form with business justification, estimated effort (in FTE-months), and strategic alignment scored 1-5 against three corporate objectives. The PMO review committee meets every two weeks, scores each submission on a 4-factor matrix (strategic fit, resource availability, complexity, expected value), and produces a ranked backlog. In a typical cycle: 3-4 requests are approved and assigned a project manager, 2-3 are deferred to the next quarter with a tentative slot, and 1-2 are declined with documented reasoning (usually because they duplicate existing initiatives or lack clear business justification). Requesters receive a decision notification within 10 business days of submission, with next steps for approved items.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Making the form too long — more than 15 fields and requesters abandon it or submit garbage data to get through it
- Not defining what happens after submission — requesters need to know the timeline, the process, and who reviews their request
- Accepting requests through other channels (email, Slack, verbal) alongside the form, which undermines the process and creates an unofficial fast lane
- Not scoring or prioritizing submissions against defined criteria, which turns the intake into a first-come-first-served queue regardless of strategic value
- Failing to communicate decisions back to requesters, which erodes trust in the process and encourages people to bypass it
- Requiring too much detail upfront — the intake form should capture enough to decide whether to proceed, not enough to write a full project plan
Frequently asked questions
How long should a project intake form be?
One page or 10-15 fields maximum. You need enough information to make a prioritization decision, not enough to write a full project plan. If requesters need more than 10 minutes to complete it, the form is too long.
Should the intake form replace the project charter?
No. The intake form captures enough to decide whether to proceed. The charter is written after approval and contains much more detail about scope, stakeholders, approach, and governance. Think of intake as the gate; the charter is what comes after you pass through it.
Who should fill out the intake form?
The person or team requesting the work — typically a business owner, department head, or client stakeholder. Not the project manager. The PM gets involved after the request is approved.
How do I standardize project intake for a PMO?
Define the form fields, create a submission channel (shared form, email alias, or tool), establish a review cadence and committee, define scoring criteria, set an SLA for decisions, and communicate the process to all potential requesters. Then enforce it — reject requests that come through other channels.
How do I handle urgent requests that cannot wait for the review cycle?
Define an expedited path for genuinely urgent requests, but require executive sponsorship to use it. This prevents everything from being marked urgent. The expedited path should still use the same form — it just gets reviewed faster.
What questions should a project intake form ask?
At minimum: what is the project, why does it matter (business justification), who is requesting it, when is it needed, what resources are required, and how does it align to strategic objectives. Optional but useful: known risks, dependencies on other projects, and what happens if we do not do it.
What is the difference between a project intake form and a project brief?
An intake form is a standardized submission that enters the prioritization queue. A project brief is a more detailed document written after a project is approved, describing the approach and context for the delivery team. The intake form feeds the brief, but they serve different audiences at different stages.
Turn this template into a live workspace
Turn requests into projects automatically. Use Praxiox forms to capture intake submissions and trigger the right workflow — submissions flow into your pipeline, get scored and prioritized, and convert into tracked initiatives without manual re-entry.
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