Scoping guide
Scope the decision before scoping the technology.
A useful opportunity assessment reduces uncertainty about what should happen next. It should not assume that a custom AI system is the answer before inspecting the workflow and evidence.
Eight scoping questions
The minimum useful assessment brief.
- 01What decision changes?
Name the user, owner, action, cadence, and consequence.
- 02What happens now?
Document the workflow, baseline, friction, cost, and current alternatives.
- 03What evidence exists?
Identify data, documents, labels, rights, quality, access, and gaps.
- 04Which options deserve comparison?
Include process change, configuration, vendor, rules, analytics, predictive methods, generative AI, and no build.
- 05How will value be tested?
Choose baseline, measures, slices, gates, qualitative review, and decision criteria.
- 06What can fail?
Surface privacy, security, permissions, bias, adoption, integration, reliability, and support constraints.
- 07Who owns what?
Assign sponsor, process owner, data owner, technical owner, reviewer, and eventual operator.
- 08What decision ends the assessment?
Define proceed, remediate, buy, re-scope, defer, or stop conditions.
Anti-deliverable
A ranked list of AI ideas is not enough.
Without a baseline, owner, evidence, constraints, evaluation, and next-decision rule, prioritization tends to reward novelty rather than feasibility or value.