Process Optimization Management:
Part 2.2 — Define Phase

3 min readFeb 26, 2021

After your business-case has been formalized, the project charta is being developed. It is a set of documents which bridge normal project management documents (e.g. Stakeholder analysis) with data-focused documents which drill down on defining and quantifying the broad statements from the business case.

For example, if you want to do anomaly detection, the project charta demands a clear definition of the word “anomaly”. What do you expect to be an anomaly? 10% less customer satisfaction? Or 20% less customer satisfaction or any deviation plus or minus from the average or even mean?

The process of creating the project charta also demands to focus more and more on very specific issues of your business case and help you to narrow down the scope of your problems. This focus on a rather reduced, focused, data-oriented and well defined projects is the first step to a successful project. Also, your business case is stated in a scientific mathematical hypothesis — easy to be convertible into “A.I. language”.

Once the project charter has been developed, many of our clients are amazed, how many people in their company will be involved in the project.

The second document is the Voice of Customer.

This is also often overlooked and often we jump into new A.I. technology without asking us, if our customer actually benefit from it. So, this document looks into what your customer really wants and needs. Have you really understood your customer? Did you talk to them? Have your team gathered enough information to answer the question, what item, function or service is being perceived critical by your customer? Content of this document will later be needed to make a thorough root-cause analysis. If you do not understand your customer, your A.I. outsourcing partner will definitely not be able to fill this gap for you — unless the project is called “understand my customer better with A.I.”.

Step Two: Process exploration

As yesterday already described, this step tries to model the underlying process in which your problem occurs. From a process management perspective, each problem is considered a process-output and all causes of a problem are process inputs. Lining up many inputs, you have yourself a process map. Mapping your daily work into processes needs a bit of practice and expertise. Not everybody is naturally born with the patience and detail-oriented mind-set to do this from day one. But with a bit of practice and training, you can learn to view your company with a process oriented mind-set. However, if you are facing a complex process, I would suggest to get outside help to not fail your A.I. project early on.

In the next chapter (s. index below) we will focus on the Measure Phase and will see, how to find causes and root causes for your problems.

If you are interested in A.I. leadership education or want to start your A.I. journey, just contact me at ansgar_linkedin@goldblum-consulting.com