Engagement
Twelve sessions. One real deliverable.
Scoping the Engagement
Scope with the business and lock the plan.
Building
Sprint the build; adjust as reality lands.
Training & Handoff
Test it, train them, and set it up in their accounts.
Buffer & Close
Held in reserve — then review, present and grade.
Visit one is Day Zero.
Sponsor check-in (10 min) → access proven live at their desk (30) → interviews and shadowing (the rest). Delta drives access; Echo drives interviews. The sprint rule holds at semester scale: no access, no start — read-only credentials first (class 14’s rule).
Visit 1 produces the findings report (systems, data, process — as observed) and the draft opportunity map. Visit 2 ranks it with the sponsor, picks the one demo target, and closes on the approval. Templates for every artifact live in the course repo — five teams, one skeleton. Firms charge $15–25K for this phase.
Dead credentials or an absent sponsor? Don’t burn the visit — switch to interviews and shadowing, log the gap, escalate to your instructor and the CTSBDC advisor the same day. And expect the memo (signed at Rotation Day, before anyone saw the systems) to be contradicted by the map — corrections go through the change order, in writing, before building.
Audit, spec, build — it’s a ladder.
“Each stage de-risks the next for the client and raises your information advantage over anyone bidding cold.” Your team delivers exactly one rung — the ladder is why any rung is a complete deliverable: an audit team is doing stage one, properly. (Retainer is the year-3 path — nobody’s rung this semester.)
Budgets chase sales-and-marketing AI, but measurable ROI concentrates in ops and finance: AP/AR, quoting, scheduling, reporting — the Tuesday chores from class 10, now with a P&L line.
Embed into the real workflow — the quote screen, the inbox, the sheet they already open — don’t perch a chatbot beside it. Adoption is designed, not hoped for.
Score the list. Commit to one.
Put the long-list on the table and score it together — value × feasibility, the class-12 axis. Their ranking will surprise you; that surprise is data. Then commit to one and write the rest down as explicitly out of scope.
“Approve” means the owner signs.
The Rotation-Day scope memo, validated against ground truth and re-signed — now carrying written acceptance criteria (class 13’s craft, executed): deliverable, criteria, deadline, exclusions by name.
The bootcamp mechanic: a concrete plan in front of the person who can say yes forces a decision. Mechanics: the approval IS visit 2’s close — the Echo books it before visit 1 ends; bring two printed copies of the revised memo and criteria; present the map and the one target; signatures in the meeting, not by email later.
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