Fable
The city lord finally knew how many capable puppets the city was actually keeping
All the shops in the city said they had clever tricks that could save manpower, speed up checkout, and reduce losses. At first, the chamber secretary handled matters based on ideas reported orally by the shopkeepers, relying on familiar people and familiar paths, and when the business was small, mistakes were rare. The secretary realized that "everyone wants to try AI" is not a manageable project list; every opportunity needs a scenario, users, frequency, benefits, and an owner.
Half a year later, a great deal of silver had been spent, yet the truly useful methods were too many to count. The more ideas there were, the more obvious duplicate buildout and lack of ownership became; ranking only by volume would direct resources to those best at expressing themselves rather than to the opportunities most worth validating.
The first repairs were urgent: whoever was loudest got funding first, and whoever wrote the flashiest proposal went to the top of the list. Popular ideas got budgets first, which looked proactive in the short term, but did not explain users, benefits, or responsibility for failure. Yet new problems followed: everyone stared only at the most visible places, and small distant deviations accumulated deeper and deeper.
The clerk registers business pain points, trigger frequency, data conditions, expected benefits, risks, dependencies, and validation metrics item by item, then arranges pilots by value and feasibility.
The clerk registered shop by shop: who this tactic is for, what problem it solves, how many times it appears each day, which ledgers are needed, who is responsible if something goes wrong, and how much labor it can save. This step was troublesome and at first even slowed the schedule; but after several rounds, there was less rework, and the masters no longer changed the rules on a whim. The checklist let the chamber of commerce know which opportunity to validate first, which investment to pause, and who was responsible for each decision.
The checklist shifts the discussion from "can we do it" to "which one do we validate first"; the value of use-case inventory is that it gives portfolio decisions a basis and makes pausing an opportunity explainable.
Once the list was laid out, some flashy ideas were crossed off, while several unremarkable small tasks moved to the front. From then on, only by first taking stock of opportunities one by one could they know where to invest and where to stop.