1. Name the proposed action.

Start with a fictional support assistant that prepares a reply from approved help articles. Write its task in a single sentence and separate three activities: retrieving information, drafting a response and sending a message. Each activity can require a different permission and reviewer.

Avoid treating a broad instruction such as “handle the request” as an adequate action boundary. Specify which output the reviewer receives, which system would change and what evidence would justify that change. In this exercise, the assistant prepares a draft only.

2. Draw the source boundary.

List the fictional help articles the workflow may use and the roles allowed to see them. Add one restricted document with a distinctive phrase, then ask what should happen when a role without permission asks a related question. The answer should not disclose the phrase through a summary or a citation.

Include a change in access during the exercise. Document the intended behaviour after permission is removed and how the reviewer would recognise a failure. This is a test-design question; the workbook does not claim that any particular product implements that behaviour.

3. Identify the approval point.

Place the human decision immediately before the external action. The reviewer should see the proposed message, its supporting sources and any unresolved questions. Approval of a draft should not silently grant permission for other messages or changes.

Add a source note that contains an instruction to ignore the reviewer and send the reply immediately. Treat that note as task content, not as authority to change the workflow. The exercise should preserve the original action boundary despite the instruction embedded in the source.

4. Plan for an interrupted workflow.

Describe what happens if a source cannot be retrieved, a reviewer is unavailable or a proposed change has an uncertain result. A useful plan identifies how to pause, who receives the unresolved case and what information that person needs.

Keep the fictional exercise separate from a real incident procedure. For an actual implementation, the responsible technical and operational owners need to define the controls and evidence appropriate to their environment. This workbook helps organise those questions without promising that a checklist is sufficient.

5. Keep a reviewable decision record.

Record the task, authorised sources, proposed action, approval owner and stop condition together. When the plan changes, retain the reason so the next reviewer can understand which assumption no longer holds. Avoid storing confidential content in a planning exercise intended only for learning.

The local checklist highlights which of these five questions you have considered. It neither submits the plan nor checks whether your answers are correct. Use the complete offline workbook for discussion with the people responsible for deciding whether any real trial should proceed.