The job
What the recurring work is, what is going wrong and what happens now — described in ordinary language.
The Coral Shark method
Understand one repeated job before changing the software.
We map what happens now, separate routine work from important decisions, test the smallest useful change and only then choose technology.
What comes from the customer
Useful context
Trigger, finish, systems, exceptions and human judgement where the customer already knows them.
Workload evidence
Frequency, worked periods and active handling time only when known. Missing numbers stay unknown.
No implementation homework
System access, rollback and technical acceptance questions wait until a later Workflow Fix is actually worth considering.
How evidence is handled
01 Customer statements remain customer-stated evidence.
02 Customer approximations remain estimates.
03 Reproducible arithmetic is calculated by deterministic software.
04 AI may structure or interpret the workflow only as labelled inference tied to non-unknown evidence.
05 Unknowns and contradictions remain visible instead of being smoothed over.
Every recommended change needs support
If a material fact is unknown, the Brief does not polish it into advice. It instead says what needs checking next or gives a specific reason not to act.
Generic model prose is not a deliverable.
Decisions that stay with people
Relationships, professional judgement, price, disputes, promises and important approvals can stay with people even when the routine administration around them changes.
The goal is to make human attention deliberate, not to eliminate it.
Decision-ready is not implementation-ready.
The £249 + VAT Brief can tell an owner what to do next without claiming Coral Shark is ready to touch live systems. A later Workflow Fix must separately establish the implementation rules, interfaces, security/access, exception handling, representative tests, acceptance criteria, customer approver and fallback.
The decision order
01 Stop work that no longer earns its place.
02 Simplify before adding technology.
03 Automate stable routine work where safe.
04 Delegate work that still needs a person but not necessarily the owner.
05 Keep human judgement where judgement is the value.