Scoping Your Adoption Plan

You have spent five chapters collecting pieces: an inventory of tasks, prompts, rules, workflows and measurement ideas. Now it is time to assemble them into a coherent plan that you could hand to your manager or apply in your own business. In this first project lesson you will define the scope, choose the tasks, set objectives, identify the people involved, assess risks and data, and decide how you will know that it worked.

The final project has three steps: scope the plan (this lesson), build and test your workflows (next lesson), then present, deploy and keep improving (last lesson). The result is a document of a few pages that you can really use. If you have followed the "Add to your adoption file" steps, you already have most of the raw material.

What your file already contains

Check your adoption file from the beginning. Over the course you added:

1. A list of your tasks with their nature (language, judgment, on-site).
2. A scored inventory, a value/effort/risk matrix and three chosen use cases.
3. Approved tools, a data traffic light, settings and a first prompt library.
4. Prompts for messages, minutes, documents and multilingual content.
5. Prompts for research, data, planning and decisions.
6. Profession-specific prompts and rules, with your red lines.
7. A usage charter draft, roles and incident procedure.
8. A paper workflow and a measurement sheet.

If something is missing, do not worry: the next sections will help you fill the gaps. The work now is less about producing new material than about choosing, linking and simplifying.

Four people, four plans

To see what a realistic scope looks like, here are the plans our four fictional characters chose. Their cases are different, and so is the right size of plan.

Who	Scope	Tasks retained	Out of scope
Camille (marketing manager)	Her two-person marketing team	Newsletter drafts, product sheets, replies to supplier emails	Customer chatbot, any use of personal data for personalization
Marc (plumber)	Himself and his part-time apprentice	Quote descriptions, site reports, customer messages	Technical or compliance advice, customer data in tools
Nadia (HR officer)	HR team of three	Job ads, onboarding booklet, training outlines	Anything that screens, ranks or evaluates people
Julien (accountant)	A group of five colleagues in the firm	Client reminders, plain-language notes on regulatory changes, meeting summaries	Tax or accounting advice, any client file in an unapproved tool

Notice that each plan has a clear "out of scope" column. Saying what you will not do is as important as saying what you will do: it protects you from unrealistic expectations and from risky uses.

The seven elements of the scope

1. Perimeter

Who is concerned (you alone, your team, a department)? Which activities? Over which period (for example, the next 90 days)? A small, well-defined perimeter is better than an ambitious, vague one.

2. Retained tasks

Choose three to five tasks from your inventory. Each should be justified with the criteria from chapter 1: repetitive, textual, tolerant to error, low data sensitivity, and with good value for modest effort. For each, write a one-sentence statement: "Use AI to [action] for [task], with [human step] before [action with consequence]."

3. Objectives

State what you want to achieve in terms you can check: less time on a task, fewer corrections, shorter reply times, more consistent documents, more time for a specific valuable activity. Avoid invented targets; instead define the indicator and the direction ("reduce the time to prepare a weekly report, with no more corrections than now"). The numbers come from your baseline measurement in the next lesson.

4. Stakeholders

Who is affected or needs to agree? Your manager, colleagues, IT, the person in charge of data protection, legal, employee representatives where relevant, customers or partners who might need to be informed. For each, note what they need to know or approve.

5. Risks and data

For each retained task, note the data involved (using your traffic light), the main risks (accuracy, confidentiality, fairness, reputation, legal) and the safeguard.

6. Resources

Which tools, which budget, how much time per week, what training? Include the review time. If a tool is not yet approved, note the request as a prerequisite.

7. Success criteria

How will you decide, in 90 days, that the plan worked? Combine time, quality and satisfaction, and define in advance what would make you adjust or stop.

A ready-to-use prompt: scope review

I am preparing an AI adoption plan for my work as [job title] in [type of organization]. Here is the scope I have drafted:
- Perimeter: [who, what, for how long]
- Retained tasks (with the human step for each): [list of 3 to 5]
- Objectives and indicators: [list]
- Stakeholders: [list]
- Data and risks per task: [summary, with no confidential details]
- Resources: [tools, time, budget, training]
- Success criteria: [list]

Act as a critical but constructive reviewer. Tell me: (1) what is unclear or too ambitious; (2) which risks I may have missed; (3) which stakeholders I may have forgotten; (4) whether any retained task seems unsuitable for AI and why; (5) five questions I should be able to answer before presenting this plan.
Do not rewrite my plan, and do not invent facts about my organization.

Template: the scope page

Here is a skeleton you can copy into your adoption file and fill in.

AI ADOPTION PLAN: SCOPE
Name / role / team: [ ]
Period: [e.g. 90 days from (date)]
Perimeter: [who and what is in; what is out]

Retained tasks (3 to 5)
1. [task]  | AI does: [ ]  | Human does: [ ]  | Data level: [green/orange/red]
2. ...

Objectives and indicators
- [objective] measured by [indicator], baseline: [to measure]

Stakeholders and what I need from each
- [person or group]: [information or approval needed]

Main risks and safeguards
- [risk] -> [safeguard]

Resources: tools [ ] | weekly time [ ] | budget [ ] | training [ ]
Success criteria at day 90: keep if [ ], adjust if [ ], stop if [ ]
Open questions: [ ]

Bad use versus good use

Bad practice	Good practice
"Use AI everywhere in the department by the end of the year."	Three to five named tasks, in a defined perimeter, over 90 days.
Setting an objective such as "increase productivity by a large percentage" from nothing.	Defining indicators now, measuring a baseline, and fixing targets once you know where you start.
Leaving data and risks for later.	Stating for each task the data color, the main risk and the safeguard before building.

Your turn: write your scope page

Exercise. Fill in the scope page template using your adoption file. Retain three to five tasks, write the "AI does / human does" split for each, define two or three indicators without targets, list your stakeholders and write your "out of scope" list. Then run the scope review prompt and decide which of the reviewer's comments you accept. Finish with your three success criteria for day 90.

See a solution

Excerpt of Julien's scope page. Perimeter: five colleagues in the firm, 90 days, internal tasks only. Retained tasks: (1) client reminders (AI drafts, the colleague checks the list of documents and sends; data: first name only, green or orange), (2) plain-language notes on regulatory changes (AI rewrites a text supplied by Julien, he verifies against the source; data: public, green), (3) summaries of internal meetings from notes without client names (AI drafts, a participant checks; data: orange). Out of scope: any client file, accounting treatment, tax advice, client-facing chatbots.

Indicators: minutes per reminder, corrections per summary, a colleague's rating of effort. Stakeholders: the managing partner (approval of scope), the IT contact (tool settings), the data protection contact (rules on client information). Success at day 90: keep if time decreases without more corrections; adjust if quality needs more review than expected; stop if neither improves. The reviewer prompt pointed out that he had not planned who trains the colleagues; he added a one-hour session.