1. Mapping
Object's consultants interview the company's staff area by area. Notes are typed during each conversation or straight after it, and every statement carries the speaker's role and the date.
The result is the company map, kept in the company's repository on Object's server or on the company's own systems, never in a public repository. The model of current processes is one of its seventeen parts:
| Part of the map | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Processes | an as-is OPM model, with makigami stories for the processes that matter |
| Business model | customer segments, products and services, channels, revenue and main costs, partners |
| Goals | what the company wants to reach, with a measure, a date and an owner per goal |
| Timeline | history that still shapes the company, and planned investments, plants, products, systems and hires |
| Organisation | units, roles, responsibilities and decision rights; people appear only as holders of roles |
| Competences | what people can do, how many can do it, knowledge held by one person only |
| Sites | plants, buildings, warehouses and offices with purpose, size and constraints |
| Assets | machines, lines, tools, measuring equipment and the vehicle fleet: type, count, age, condition, control system, connectivity |
| Systems | applications, databases, spreadsheets and shared folders that carry work, with the role each fills, its owner and how it exchanges data |
| Infrastructure | networks, servers, cloud services, identities and access, backups, security |
| Products | the portfolio, variants, what is made to order, volumes, the data that describes products |
| Suppliers | what each supplier or subcontractor delivers or does, how orders and confirmations pass, dependencies |
| Customers | customer groups and key customers: how they order, what they require, how they receive goods and pay |
| Obligations | standards, certifications, regulations, contracts and audits, each with an owner |
| Indicators | what is measured today, how often, and who looks at it |
| Risks | what could stop the work, with likelihood, impact and the current safeguard |
| Data | kinds of data, where each lives, who owns each fact, how long it is kept, what is personal or confidential |
Registers record kinds and counts, without personal data. Where a person has to be named, the name stays in the company's repository with that person's consent.
Processes are drawn in OPM notation (ISO 19450) in a modelling tool that runs as a VS Code extension. The tool checks the model's structure and shows user stories as makigami. People check whether the model is true: it counts as reviewed when every process in it has been confirmed by at least one person who does that work.
2. Designing
The map is compared with the catalogue of module roles. Every gap found is one of four kinds:
- no system or person fills a role the company needs;
- two systems fill the same role at once;
- data passes between two systems with no agreed contract, by file export, e-mail or retyping;
- nobody owns a fact.
Each gap gets a cost in the company's own units: hours per week, errors per month or orders lost. Module selection starts with the most expensive gaps.
A system that the company already runs and that fills its role acceptably stays in place. It gets an adapter to the role's contract, and the people who use it carry on as before. A missing system is added through the same contract, from whichever vendor suits the company.
The deployment plan names, for each role, what fills it (a Phenome module, an existing system, a third-party product or nothing yet), the adapter, the contract version and the phase. The first phase has to go live on its own; a phase that only pays off together with a later one is merged into it or cut down. A decision-maker in the company approves the scope of the first phase.
3. Building
Adapters to the company's systems are written for each deployment, against the contract of the role each one serves. They go into the company's repository with the plan. Writing them requires access to the systems that are to be connected. Platform modules enter a deployment at released versions.
The agent kit is in development. With it, an AI agent will be able to write adapters and configurator definitions whose code goes through the same verification as code written by a person.
4. Verifying
The conformance suites are in development. Once they are ready, every module and adapter will run the suite of its role: valid and invalid examples, and behaviour under retry, timeout and an unknown outcome. The replacement test runs the same suite against another implementation of the same role.
A phase is verified when all its implementations have passed. The company decides when it goes live.
5. Monitoring
The monitor, still in development, collects what each contract promises to report once a phase is live. A deviation, meaning a broken contract or a process that has changed in the company, opens the next design round.