YOUR OBJECTIVE COMES FIRST
Customer document review
Choose a useful first investment, with a reason to proceed.
EDPNC identifies technology, life sciences, finance, advanced manufacturing and furniture among North Carolina industries. A useful scoping example is cross-functional program intake. Follow a program request, supporting evidence and delivery-owner assignment through the work with business sponsors, technical leads and program management. Several functions can accept the request while none has authority to resolve competing priorities. Who can resolve a conflict between the participating functions?
Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina: Industries ↗01Start with a decision or recurring task
Identify who does the work, what they need from the output and what happens when it is wrong. Compare an AI approach with configuration, rules or a process change. An assessment should explain the problem worth solving before proposing a model or a tool.
02Check the information the idea depends on
Review representative documents, source permissions, record quality and access to existing systems. Identify missing inputs and the person authorized to resolve them. A large document collection is not automatically a usable knowledge base, and a system login is not the same as an approved integration. Working example: A redacted review packet and decision checklist.
03Build a baseline people can inspect
Record current handling time, review effort, error types and transaction volume. Estimate operating costs alongside implementation and support. Use a small evaluation set to test the proposal against this baseline, including incomplete records and cases where the system should stop for help. For cross-functional program intake, agree how business sponsors, technical leads and program management contribute where those functions are involved.
04Agree on who can approve the next step
Name the business sponsor, process owner, technical reviewer and people who will use the result. Set a bounded pilot, acceptance criteria and a stop decision. The roadmap should make dependencies visible rather than turn every possible use case into an immediate commitment. Review check: A reviewer can explain the evidence required for each decision.