Colabmo development course A-P02

Learning objective: Manage new ideas and dependencies without losing the agreed outcome.

First principles inquiry can expose problems beyond the original process. That is useful information, but discovery is not automatic authorization to redesign the whole organization. Preserve a clear current decision, an explicit boundary and a small set of outputs.

When a new issue arises, classify it as necessary to this decision, a dependency requiring another owner, or a future opportunity. If it is necessary, estimate the impact of including it and ask the scope owner to decide the tradeoff. If it is a dependency, record what assumption the current work uses and what happens if it is false.

Use an evidence gate at each transition. Before reconstruction, the outcome, functions and material premises must be sufficiently clear. Before testing, authority, measures and stop conditions must be set. These are teaching checkpoints for the exercise, not new company-wide mandatory approval procedures.

A useful scope response is: “This issue may affect our result. Within today’s boundary we can test the routing mechanism, but we cannot decide the company’s delegation policy. We will document the dependency and ask its owner to resolve it.” This keeps the inquiry honest without hiding the constraint.

Close with decisions and evidence, not only a diagram. Capture which options remain, why one test is next, who owns it and when results will be reviewed. Use the organization’s existing task system for commitments. The worksheets support reasoning; they are not a parallel task-status system.

Practice

Use W10 to handle a proposal to replace the entire customer database during an intake redesign. State what is within scope, what evidence is needed, the decision owner and the consequences of accepting or deferring the change.

Check your reasoning

Should the team ignore an outside dependency to protect scope?