Describe your intake and sign-off path. Makeform creates a project approval form for the business case, scope, budget, timeline, risks, dependencies, and stakeholder decisions.
Route project proposals to Slack, Google Sheets, and Zapier.
Sample prompts for the builder
Choose a starting point, tailor the prompt, and send it to the Makeform builder.
Audience
Business teams proposing work to a central PMO
Format
Stage-gated intake with sponsor and portfolio details
Prompt size
255 chars
Example form structure
Stage-gated intake with sponsor and portfolio details
Project, requestor, department, and sponsor
Problem, outcomes, and strategic objective
Budget, dates, dependencies, and risks
Stakeholder decision and comments
Suggested routing tags
Needs triage
Under review
Decision recorded
Ask for the decision deadline and the accountable sponsor. Those two fields prevent proposals from waiting in an ownerless review queue.
Step 1
Propose
business case, scope, owner, and evidence
Step 2
Triage
completeness, priority, and review path
Step 3
Review
budget, capacity, dependencies, and risk
Step 4
Decide
decision, conditions, owner, and date
Why structured approval matters
A shared form gives every request the same minimum brief and reviewers one place to decide.
Required case, scope, cost, timeline, and ownership fields make unlike requests easier to compare.
Show specialist questions only when relevant, then notify the responsible reviewers.
Capture the outcome, comments, conditions, date, and accountable decision-maker.
Designed for governance
Keep early intake concise, then reveal deeper questions before funding and scheduling.
Collect the problem, outcome, sponsor, effort, and deadline for early triage.
Compare benefits, measures, costs, alternatives, assumptions, and inaction.
Give affected teams distinct recommendation fields before final review.
Record the decision, conditions, date, approved owner, and next checkpoint.
Approval workflow
Generate the intake and send complete proposals through a consistent review path.
Define the project types, required evidence, reviewers, and accountable decision-maker.
Add objectives, budget bands, risk categories, conditional questions, and necessary attachments.
Publish the intake and route proposals to email, Slack, Sheets, or Zapier.
Preserve the decision, comments, conditions, date, and any later revision.
Form vs document vs email
A form standardizes the summary and decision while still accepting a detailed proposal attachment.
Field guide
These six sections give the proposer enough structure to make a case and give stakeholders enough context to make a traceable decision.
Request identity
Use identifiers that make the request easy to route and retrieve. Separate the requestor from the sponsor.
Need and outcome
Ask what happens now, who is affected, and what measurable change the project should create.
Scope and plan
Define inclusions, exclusions, deliverables, milestones, and contributing teams so estimates have clear boundaries.
Cost and value
Match the estimate to the gate: use ranges early, then require funding, operating impacts, and quotes.
Risk and dependency
Show dependencies, constraints, and uncertainty before committing money or capacity. Trigger specialist questions when relevant.
Review and decision
Record the decision, comments, conditions, date, and next action so the team knows whether to revise, schedule, or stop.
Related tools
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Capture the first project outline, ownership, goals, and timing before deeper review begins.
Open toolGive reviewers consistent scoring criteria and space for evidence-based recommendations.
Open toolCollect costs, funding, asset details, alternatives, and finance review for capital requests.
Open toolAssess proposed changes to approved scope, schedule, budget, ownership, or dependencies.
Open toolRoute operational or system changes through impact, priority, and reviewer questions.
Open toolClarify the task, desired result, owner, due date, inputs, and handoff after approval.
Open toolFAQ
Practical answers for PMO leaders, managers, and operations teams standardizing proposal intake and decisions.
A project approval form presents an initiative for review. It captures the need, outcomes, scope, owner, budget, timeline, dependencies, risks, evidence, stakeholder recommendations, and a dated final decision with comments or conditions.
Include the title, requestor, owner, sponsor, problem, outcomes, measures, scope, exclusions, deliverables, dates, budget, staffing, dependencies, risks, and attachments. Finish with reviewer identity, decision, comments, conditions, date, and next owner.
A proposal document explains the case in depth. An approval form standardizes required facts and reviewer responses. Combine them by collecting a structured summary and accepting the detailed proposal as an attachment.
Yes. Add recommendation fields for each affected team with reviewer, comments, conditions, and date. Keep one accountable decision field at the end so recommendations are distinct from the final outcome.
Yes. Use a project-type choice and conditional sections. Capital requests can show funding and asset questions; technology requests can show system, data, migration, and support questions. Keep shared business-case fields consistent.
Offer changes requested, deferred, and rejected outcomes. Require comments and a next owner for revisions. If the proposal returns, preserve the earlier decision and ask what changed.
Yes. Makeform supports unlimited free forms and responses, including generating, editing, and publishing your project approval form. The paid tier removes Makeform branding.
Send submissions to the Makeform inbox, email, Slack, Google Sheets, or Zapier workflows. Include a project identifier so follow-ups and portfolio records stay tied to the request.
Replace scattered proposal threads with structured intake.
