Ask any PMO lead what keeps them up at night and the answer is rarely 'delivery'. It's 'demand'. Too many requests, too few resources, no consistent way to decide what gets done and what gets parked.
What is input management?
Input management is the discipline of systematically capturing every demand — change requests, strategic initiatives, BAU improvements, ad-hoc asks — and running them through a consistent triage and prioritisation process before they consume resources.
Without it, the loudest voice wins. With it, you make deliberate decisions about where to invest capacity.
Three signs you need it
First, your backlog has no single owner. Second, the same request appears in multiple forms from multiple stakeholders. Third, you can't answer the question 'what are we not doing, and why?' If any of these sound familiar, your input management needs work.