Inventory Workflows, Experiments, and Tool Requests

What you will complete

Complete the Portfolio Charter and Opportunity Register with a boundary, trigger, workflow, intended outcome, stage, and current owner.

Portfolio rule: A tool request enters the portfolio only after it is connected to a real workflow, operating problem, and decision owner.

Define the portfolio boundary

Choose the company, business unit, or operating area this plan governs. State what leadership decision the 90-day plan must support and which work remains outside it. A useful boundary prevents one portfolio from mixing minor personal productivity tools with cross-functional systems that require executive ownership.

Inventory work, not excitement

Collect active pilots, purchased tools, proposed integrations, repeated workflow complaints, and abandoned experiments. Translate each into a trigger-to-outcome workflow. Record the current state and intended business result without assuming automation is the answer. Duplicate requests from different teams may describe one underlying process.

Record stage and ownership honestly

Use states such as idea, investigate, discovery, design, build, launch, operate, paused, and stopped. Name the current business owner and system owner when they exist. Missing ownership is a decision-relevant gap, not a blank to fill with the nearest manager.

Worked example: Harbourline Business Services

Fictional teaching example: Harbourline Business Services is a fictional 42-person Ontario company. Its leaders list seven requests: lead qualification, invoice intake, customer onboarding, meeting summaries, executive reporting, contract review, and an unowned chatbot pilot. These are learner fixtures, not Flowgrammer projects. The inventory reveals that several requests are tool labels rather than defined workflows.

Harbourline is not a Flowgrammer client. Its people, projects, weights, scores, costs, metrics, and outcomes are fictional learner inputs. Replace them with evidence from your organization and retain the evidence source beside each decision.

Workbook exercise

Complete section 1 of the 90-Day AI Automation Portfolio Workbook.

1. Set the portfolio boundary and executive decision.
2. List every active idea, pilot, tool request, and repeated workflow problem.
3. Translate each item into trigger, workflow, and intended outcome.
4. Record stage, business owner, system owner, and known duplicate or dependency.

Ask the affected owner to challenge one assumption. Record the original entry, revision reason, decision owner, and review date rather than silently replacing the history.

Common failure modes

• Inventorying only projects favored by leadership.
• Calling a product name a workflow.
• Assigning owners without confirming authority.
• Treating every existing pilot as an obligation to continue.

A portfolio should expose weak evidence and constrained capacity. Repair the responsible layer instead of increasing the score or compressing the schedule.

Capstone connection

Complete the Portfolio Charter and Opportunity Register with a boundary, trigger, workflow, intended outcome, stage, and current owner. The section must be specific enough for leadership, affected operators, and an implementation reviewer to inspect. It remains planning evidence rather than proof of implementation or outcome.

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