The evaluation plan

The six questions

Answer them in plain language, in a shared document, with the person who owns the process in the room. Not in a ticket, and not alone.

1. What must this produce?

One or two sentences describing a thing, not an intention. "A first-draft response to a supplier query, for a human to approve" is a specification. "Improve supplier response times" is a hope, and nobody can evaluate a hope.

2. How will we know it is right?

This is the one that carries everything, and the one almost everyone skips because it feels obvious until you write it down. Describe an input and the exact output it should give, so that somebody else could check it without asking you.

If the honest answer is that a person would have to read every output and use judgment, write that down too. It is still an answer, and it tells you the real running cost before you commit to it rather than after.

If you cannot answer this one, stop. That is not a delay, it is the finding. An unwritten standard is indistinguishable from no standard, and a reviewer with no standard will correctly decline. Build nothing until this question has an answer.

3. What must it never do?

One-line rules, usually about money, personal data, or anything irreversible. Never invent a figure. Never guess at a date. Never send anything outward without a person seeing it first.

These go unwritten because they feel too obvious to say. They are not obvious at all to a system that will otherwise fill the gap with something plausible.

4. What counts as good enough to widen?

A number, and the sample it is measured on, written down before you see any results. Deciding what counts as success after you know the score is how careful organizations talk themselves into shipping things they should not have.

Include the number that actually predicts safety, which is not accuracy. It is how often the system is wrong while looking right. A confident, well-formatted, subtly wrong answer is the expensive failure, because nothing raises an error and it is found a month later by somebody doing an audit.

5. Who signs this off, and what do they need to see?

Name the person or the committee, and ask them now what evidence they would need. This is the question that separates an organization where approval takes a week from one where it takes two quarters, and asking it early costs nothing.

Most reviewers are not obstructive. They are being asked to accept a risk nobody has described to them in terms they can weigh.

6. What is explicitly out of scope?

Write down what this is not, or it will grow while you are not looking. This is the line that protects a fixed timeline, and the one most often left out.