Capstone One: Path and Scope

In practice

Priya Nair is a senior analyst at a regional water utility. Her small challenge was the Service Disconnection, the decision to shut off a household's water for unpaid bills. Her Silver Pack took an afternoon, and showing it to a billing supervisor changed two things: the definition gained a protected status for households with a medical exemption, and the lifecycle gained a pending-review state nobody had written down. Now she chooses a path, using unit one's steps. She controls her own work and has influence over one project, the replacement of the billing system's collections module. The riskiest thing in that work is the Service Disconnection, because its mistakes reach families, money and the law. So she proposes a single-project pilot rather than staying with individual practice. For scope, she applies unit two's test. Collections carries real risk and regular audits, the collections manager is supportive, and the project is behind schedule but not on fire. She sets the ambition at maturity level three for collections: a shared vocabulary for its core things. She records the starting point for later: in the last year, four complaints to the regulator came from disconnections that should have been paused.