Read the process. Bring an engagement.
Stages 1 to 5 run on the supplied Meridian engagement and need nothing but the reading below. Stages 6 and 7 work on an engagement you run yourself, so the one thing to bring is a real feature you expect to deliver in your next interval.
Bring an engagement you can actually change
Bring an engagement you can actually change
The last two stages produce a commitment you take to a counterparty. That only works if you have one, and if you can influence how the work is accepted.
- Why it matters
- A practitioner with no engagement can complete stages 1 to 5 and learn the model, but cannot do the transfer stages. The course still runs; the assessment does not.
- Good enough
- A feature in flight, a delivery you are accountable for, or a pilot you are scoping. It does not need to be AI-assisted work.
- Not enough
- A hypothetical project, or work where you cannot name a single person on the client side. Stage 7 asks for real names.
- If you have neither
- Pair with an attendee who does. The transfer stages are individual by design, but a shared engagement is better than an invented one.
Three things to do first
Read the operating process
The course assumes the reference page, not a summary of it. Read it once before the course. You do not need to memorise the registers; you need to know they exist and roughly what each one decides.
- Sections 01 to 03
- The organization, the hat register and the gate-by-gate accountability. Stages 1 and 2 work directly from these.
- Sections 04 and 05
- Operating cadence and the organizational handshake. Stages 3 and 4 work from these.
- Sections 06 to 10
- Ceremonies, role view, decomposition, the two loops and the operating boundary. Stages 5 to 7 work from these.
Read the supplied engagement
The Meridian slice is short. Read the cast, the artifacts and the contested Judge before stage 1 so that instructional time is spent deciding rather than reading.
- The cast
- Named people and the hats they hold. Two hats are deliberately vacant.
- The artifacts
- What exists for the slice and what each one is silent about.
- The contested Judge
- Four claims ready, one contested. Do not resolve it before stage 5.
Bring your own engagement
For stages 6 and 7, bring one feature you expect to deliver next interval, and whatever you know about who accepts it and who authorizes its release. Incomplete answers are useful; the gaps are the material.
- The feature
- Small enough to decompose in twenty-five minutes. A slice, not a programme.
- The people
- Who accepts the outcome, who authorizes promotion, and who supplies domain judgment.
- The records
- Where your team writes decisions down today, whatever the tools are called.
The referenceEverything this course teaches is written down at the AI-DLC operating process. The course is how to run it; the page is what it says.
Ready to start when
- You have read the operating process reference once, end to end.
- You can state, without looking, which three decisions the operating process keeps separate.
- You have a real feature for stages 6 and 7, or a partner whose feature you will use.
- You can name at least one person on the client side of your own engagement.