part three · initiative identification

Initiative Identification

Naming the gap between current state and goal.

An initiative is the named gap between where the people the chain is for are now, and where the goal says they should be. It is not a feature. It is not a project. It is a piece of work big enough to require Discovery — and contained enough to fit within a quarter or two of focused effort.

When to name an initiative

An initiative is the right shape when:

• The change required to close the gap is unfamiliar enough that the team cannot name the feature without first running Discovery.
• The work is plural — two or three Volume II briefs will live inside it before it ships.
• A decision to fund this initiative means a decision not to fund another one of comparable size.

If the work is small enough that one brief can hold it, it is a feature, not an initiative. If the work is large enough that the team can't see the scope after one quarter of Discovery, it is a portfolio bet, not an initiative — and the leadership needs to decide whether to invest in initiative-level Discovery first.

The initiative naming conversation

Held by the PO with leadership, anchored to a goal.

Three questions, in order:

1. Who is the named person, and what is their current state? Gal, an exam grader at our largest customer, currently spends 47 minutes per grading cycle and grades approximately 60 cycles per week.
2. What is the goal, and what does it mean for this person? The 12-month goal is that 80% of grading is done in under 15 minutes. For Gal, that means 32 minutes saved per cycle, ~32 hours per week.
3. What is the gap? We do not know what produces the 47 minutes. We have hypotheses but no observation. We don't know which subset of those minutes is removable.

The third answer is the initiative brief.

What a good initiative brief contains

This is a Volume II artifact in shape, but it is triggered by Volume I. The PO drafts; leadership signs off.

• Business gap. What would be true financially if this initiative succeeded? Not a precise number — a credible range.
• Human gap. What would be true in the named person's life? Witnessed-not-described, where possible. Gal would leave work at the time her contract says she leaves.
• Discovery questions. What does the team need to learn before it can scope? Listed.
• Value declaration (V). A range. Worth around X if it works.
• Financial translation. What V means in terms of investment ceiling, rework tolerance, and discovery billing.

Picking which initiatives

A leadership decision, taken with the PO present.

The corpus does not prescribe a scoring framework — every project has slightly different math. It does prescribe two questions:

1. If we had to choose only one initiative this quarter, which one? Forces a real ranking.
2. What would we have to be willing to walk away from to fund this one? Names the cost.

If the answer to either question is we don't know, the initiative is not ready for the portfolio.

Gaps to discovery

The transition from this part to Volume II is the most common place for the chain to fail. The pattern: an initiative is named, leadership commits, and someone — usually a developer — starts solving it before Discovery has run. The brief that should have come first becomes a postmortem six months later.

The corpus pattern: an initiative does not enter execution until at least one Volume II brief inside it has been written, predicted, and signed off. This is a Volume I rule, enforced at portfolio level. Without it, every later volume's discipline is performative.

What this produces for the rest of the chain

Volume	What it inherits
II	The initiative-level questions Discovery must answer before scope can begin.
III	The scope envelope — what is in this initiative, what is the next one.
IV	The execution rationale — why we built this, traceable upward.
V	The portfolio's check — did this initiative do what we said it would?

Part 4 — Value Declaration →