YOUR OBJECTIVE COMES FIRST
Commercial preparation
Choose a useful first investment, with a reason to proceed.
VEDP highlights cloud and AI infrastructure, tech and cyber, financial services, manufacturing and supply chain management. A useful scoping example is client-project access and delivery coordination. Follow a delivery brief, access approval and dependency register through the work with delivery managers, client sponsors and system administrators. A project team may be staffed before the permissions needed for productive work are available. Which access dependency must be resolved before delivery work can start?
Virginia Economic Development Partnership: All 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: An approved account brief and example follow-up.
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 client-project access and delivery coordination, agree how delivery managers, client sponsors and system administrators 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: Reviewers can trace facts and approve customer-facing wording.