Workflow readiness

Workflow Readiness

Overview

Run the first stage of the collaboration framework before assigning delegation modes. Determine whether a recurring workflow has enough evidence and control infrastructure to justify detailed task profiling; do not treat this screen as permission to automate.

When to use

• Before a recurring, long-running, background, or end-to-end agent workflow.
• Before promoting a prototype or pilot to routine use or broader scope.
• When someone asks whether an agent is "ready to take over" a workflow.

When NOT to use: a one-off read-only request; a trivial local task; or mode assignment for a workflow whose readiness was already confirmed against current evidence. Use task-profile for the second-stage, per-step analysis.

Process

1. Bound the candidate. Name the workflow, users, frequency, inputs, outputs, systems touched, and the point at which an output becomes effective. Split off obviously distinct or judgment-heavy segments rather than averaging them into one score.
2. Check task-fit. Identify candidate segments that are sufficiently structured and have a criterion named before seeing the output. Mark where problem framing, criteria, or their weighting must first be set by a human.
3. Check agent reliability. Require task- and context-specific evidence from representative cases, including relevant failure modes. General model reputation, confidence, fluency, and success on another task are not evidence.
4. Check intervention design. Locate checkpoints before consequence. Confirm that the authorized human can see the needed evidence, apply a real criterion where one exists or exercise the human-owned judgment where it does not, revise or stop the run, and has enough time and competence to intervene.
5. Check system resilience. Verify constraint and state retention across the workflow horizon, error containment, checkpoint/restart behavior, audit logs, and recovery or rollback proportional to the exposure. Name the evidence. Treat this as an initiative-level screen; task-profile reapplies the architecture gate to each concrete implementation step.
6. Rate each prerequisite supported, conditional, unsupported, or unknown in assets/workflow-readiness.md. Never convert missing evidence into a positive rating.
7. Issue one outcome using the rules below, record the gaps and evidence plan, and ask the human to confirm the screen before any recurring setup.

Outcome rules

• ready for task profiling — all four prerequisites are supported for the bounded candidate. Continue with task-profile; no action is authorized.
• pilot/assistive only — no fatal barrier is known, but at least one prerequisite is conditional or unknown, task-fit is unsupported for autonomy but bounded non-effecting assistance remains viable, or only such assistance is justified. Keep work reversible and bounded; use a pilot to gather missing reliability or resilience evidence. Unknown reliability or resilience explicitly rules out autonomous delegation.
• not ready — no useful segment can be bounded into verifiable work or safely governed non-effecting assistance, no effective intervention point exists before consequence, the architecture cannot contain/recover from plausible failures, or an applicable constraint forbids the candidate design. Redesign or narrow it before profiling.

These outcomes are readiness verdicts, not delegation modes. Do not substitute pilot/assistive only for the assistive mode without a task profile.

Rationalizations

Excuse	Rebuttal
"The model is generally excellent."	Reliability must be demonstrated for this task, context, and failure exposure.
"We can add a reviewer later."	An intervention point is a design prerequisite, not a post-launch promise.
"Unknown means probably fine."	Unknown means evidence is absent; it cannot support autonomous delegation.
"The workflow is too mixed to rate."	Segment it. Readiness and delegation are properties of bounded task segments.

Red flags

• A readiness claim based on demos, confidence, or aggregate model benchmarks.
• A checkpoint after the output has already taken effect.
• Recovery described as "rerun it" without state, idempotency, or rollback evidence.
• One workflow-wide average hiding an unsupported segment.

Verification

The screen is complete when the candidate is bounded; all four prerequisites have a rating, evidence, and owner for any gap; unknown reliability or resilience does not yield a positive autonomy claim; exactly one outcome is recorded; and the human has confirmed the result before second-stage profiling or setup.