The M-CaReM-AI Method: Defining Work for AI / Unit 3 MCM 069 review, 2 to 3 minutes
The Library Through Five Questions
The idea
A worked example, constructed for this course, asks the library's team the five phase questions, to show what each one produces before any phase is done in depth.
In practice
The first question asks what the library's world is made of. The team names Member, Item, Loan, Hold, Fine and Branch, and the head of circulation adds Lost Item Report, a thing nobody had listed because it lives in a paper binder. The second asks what they do to those things. For the Loan, that means create it at checkout, read it on the member's account, update it on renewal, close it on return, generate overdue notices from it, and log every change for disputes about fines. The third asks where everything about a Loan is kept. The honest answer is in four places, so the team decides the Loan needs a Pack. The fourth asks whether that would match reality. The team realizes that branch staff, who handle renewals at the desk, were never asked how renewals actually work, and books a session with them. The fifth asks what happens when reality changes. The team remembers the laptop loan period that broke the overdue notices, and agrees the Loan is the first thing that deserves a traceability matrix.
Where people slip
One meeting with five questions produced a missing thing, a list of behaviors, a decision to build a Pack, a validation session and a candidate for traceability. None of the phases is finished, and none needed to be. The point of asking all five early is that the team now knows exactly where each phase starts, and which thing, the Loan, deserves attention first. The paper binder alone would have been missed by a feature list.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
Unlocks
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