The five phases
Own it
Progress becomes measurable. Someone is accountable for the outcome, and there is a number describing how things stand today.
You end up with: One page, four lines
Read it1Find it
Work can start without an archaeology expedition. What you own is known, located and owned by someone.
You end up with: An inventory
Read it2Agree it
Numbers stop being negotiable. The things you found mean one thing across systems, so an automated answer can be trusted.
You end up with: Three definitions
Read it3Trace it
The real process, exceptions included, leaves a record. Now there is something concrete to learn from and to automate against.
You end up with: A month of the real process
Read it4Ship it
It reaches production and stays there. It passes review, and it survives the person who built it leaving.
You end up with: Four pages and a second pair of hands
Read itWhy the order matters
You cannot agree what a customer is across systems you cannot search. You cannot instrument a process nobody owns. You cannot pass a security review on a system whose data flows nobody has written down. Each phase is the ground the next one stands on, which is why doing them out of order feels like progress and produces none.
This is also why a small problem in an early phase outranks a large one later. A phase 0 gap at twelve percent likelihood beats a phase 4 gap at seventy, because the phase 4 work will not survive without it.
What this roadmap will not tell you
Which phase you are in. That is the one part that is specific to you, and reading five descriptions and picking the one that feels right is how companies end up two phases ahead of themselves. The diagnostic asks the questions that separate the phases, and it takes about six minutes.