# What evidence earns the next round of funding?

Use this record to request one limited evidence-producing investment. The completed support example is hypothetical. No discovery, operator trial, target-system evaluation, or live pilot has occurred.

## Completed teaching example

**Proposed job:** prepare a support ticket's category, urgency, supporting facts, and missing information for a reviewer. No customer contact, ticket closure, or access change.

**Decision currently blocked:** whether to fund and permit a pilot. A convincing demo does not show how the actual team will use and check the drafts, what data use is permitted, which errors are unacceptable, or what the whole service costs.

### Four separate gates

| Gate                           | Status now | Missing evidence and responsible role                                                                                                                                              |
| ------------------------------ | ---------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Owned outcome                  | Unknown    | Workflow owner confirms eligible tickets, accepted result, baseline, and accountability.                                                                                           |
| Independent verifier           | Unknown    | A senior reviewer and separate qualified checker establish correct answers, confirm that the check rejects a bad answer, and reserve time to review.                               |
| Bounded authority and loss     | Unknown    | Data, policy, and risk owners decide which records and destinations are permitted, what the service may do, which errors or losses are unacceptable, and when to stop and recover. |
| Positive value after full cost | Unknown    | Workflow owner and sponsor establish how much useful work is accepted, review effort, whole-service costs, and remaining harm or loss.                                             |

Do not total or average the gates. Any failed or unknown gate blocks starting or continuing a live pilot. Only authorized discovery may proceed; funding cannot override data, action, risk, or release authority.

### Proposed discovery allowance

| Maximum staff time                      | Work                                                                                                                                                                 | Required result                                                                                                                                        |
| --------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| 1 hour                                  | Confirm owners and permitted sources.                                                                                                                                | Record who can approve the investigation and which records may be inspected. If access is unresolved, stop the conditional case work.                  |
| 3 hours, conditional on approved access | Walk through permitted cases. Check whether the checker rejects a deliberately wrong category or urgency recommendation whose correct answer was checked separately. | Observed reviewer steps, missing facts, reasons to reject a draft, and limits of the small sample. No model-provider calls or customer-system changes. |
| 2 hours                                 | Compare the assistant, current manual path, or a smaller repair.                                                                                                     | Costs, risks, unknowns, and a next decision with an owner.                                                                                             |

Total allowance: **1 + 3 + 2 = 6 staff-hours**, counting all participants' time. A one-hour walkthrough with two people uses two staff-hours. At an invented USD 150/hour planning rate, this is **USD 900 of labor allocation**. It is not a market price, realized expenditure, or full project cost. The example assumes an existing approved workspace and no new licenses or provider calls. Estimate and approve any other expense before incurring it. Unused time cannot be redirected into a larger task without approval.

### Review and stop

- Review at the six-hour limit, or earlier when access or another required condition blocks the plan.
- Preserve facts that challenge the assistant: a missing policy, review that is too costly, an effective smaller repair, or no qualified reviewer with time.
- Keep observations, local test results, estimates, and evidence still missing from the actual team and system separate.
- Report what time/cost was used, which question was answered, and which remains open.
- Reassess all four gates. A further discovery request must identify the specific uncertainty it would resolve.
- Trying the service against live tickets without using its answers is a shadow trial. That and live use need their own resolved gates, software tests, operator acceptance, adoption and value checks, operating capacity, and approval. Six discovery hours authorize neither.

**Current teaching decision:** propose authorization of this limited discovery plan, subject to its access conditions; defer pilot and rollout. No work has run, no target gate has passed, and no actual funding authority has approved the proposal.

## Your next investment

Use **unknown** rather than a confident estimate where evidence is absent.

- Proposed workflow and exact decision currently blocked:
- Existing manual or smaller alternative:
- What has actually been observed or tested, and its sources:
- Owned-outcome gate: pass / fail / unknown; evidence and owner:
- Independent-verifier gate: pass / fail / unknown; evidence and owner:
- Authority/loss gate: pass / fail / unknown; evidence and owner:
- Full-cost-value gate: pass / fail / unknown; evidence and owner:
- One uncertainty that could reverse the investment:
- Permitted discovery task and result someone can inspect afterward:
- Required access, permitted data handling, and approving owner:
- Work excluded; actions and provider destinations prohibited:
- Staff-time limit, other costs, currency, and maximum approved spend:
- People with confirmed time; independent checking where required:
- Stop condition and owner of any unfinished work:
- Evidence that would support another investigation, narrowing, deferral, or stop:
- Decision-maker, review point, and place to record findings:
- Actual time/cost used and result after the investigation:
- Missing answers to the four gates and other approvals before any pilot or release:

Keep the previous decision and evidence when revising this record. Permission to fund work and permission to operate software remain separate decisions.