Lab: Applying the 20-Domain Diagnostic to Northbrook Manufacturing

FlowRidge

COMPEL Specialization — AITB-TRA: AI Transformation Readiness Specialist Lab 1 of 1

Lab brief

Northbrook Manufacturing is a fictional mid-sized industrial manufacturer based on composite characteristics drawn from publicly reported industrial AI restart cases (see Article 1’s Zillow and NatWest discussion and Article 6’s Gap Inc. discussion for the pattern). The sponsor — Northbrook’s newly appointed chief transformation officer — has commissioned a six-week readiness assessment after the company’s 2024 predictive-maintenance pilot stalled. The sponsor wants a “go / wait / redesign” call inside the next six weeks, supported by evidence the board can read in a single meeting. You are the assigned AITB-TRA specialist. This lab walks you through the diagnostic from intake to interim recommendation.

Lab inputs (summarized)

You have the following evidence at intake:

Interview transcripts with eight stakeholders (CEO, CFO, chief transformation officer, VP of operations, plant general manager at the lead pilot site, lead data engineer, maintenance reliability engineer, union representative for the pilot site).
A decision log from the 2024 pilot, including the three decisions that led to its suspension.
Plant-level metric snapshots: overall equipment effectiveness, unplanned-downtime rate, maintenance-labor hours, and data-quality metrics for the sensor feed.
An internal audit report on the company’s existing risk-management framework, noting AI-specific gaps.
Employee engagement survey results from the last two quarters, showing a decline in “ability to keep up with change” scores.
A portfolio summary of the company’s active transformation initiatives: thirteen programs currently in flight across operations, finance, commercial, and IT.
A public second-quarter earnings call transcript in which the CEO named AI as a strategic priority for the next three years.

Exercise 1 — Sort the evidence (15 minutes)

Take the eight evidence candidates above and classify each against the readiness rubric. For each candidate, name (a) which of the twenty dimensions the evidence most directly supports, (b) the evidence type (document, metric, observation, interview, survey, artifact), (c) the corroboration level (self-report, corroborative, direct).

A completed classification for candidate one (the CEO interview) might read: “Supports D02 (sponsor strength) primarily and D17 (risk classification) secondarily; evidence type is interview; corroboration level is self-report because the statement ‘the board is behind this’ is the CEO’s own account and requires corroboration from a board member or board minutes before scoring.”

Work through all eight. Your completed classification is the input to Exercise 2.

Exercise 2 — Score three dimensions (20 minutes)

Using the classified evidence, score the following three dimensions on the five-level scale (nascent, emerging, scaling, mature, transformational): D02 (sponsor strength), D08 (change capacity), D11 (data foundation readiness).

For each dimension, write:

The score assigned.
The two or three pieces of evidence that most strongly support the score.
The corroboration chain (self-report, corroborative, direct) for each piece of evidence.
The confidence level (moderate, high) given the evidence available.
One specific corroborating input you would gather in the next week to raise confidence.

An example scoring for D02 might read: “Score — emerging. Evidence — (1) CEO named AI as strategic priority in Q2 earnings call (document, direct evidence that sponsor visibility exists); (2) CFO interview confirmed budget authorization for the three-year horizon (interview, self-report but corroborated against the earnings transcript); (3) chief transformation officer is new in seat, political capital not yet established (interview, self-report). Confidence — moderate. Next-week input — a sample of the CEO’s calendar for the last six weeks to verify sustained engagement beyond quarterly public moments, and a brief interview with one independent board member to corroborate the CFO’s account of board support.”

The scoring exercise tests the discipline the course teaches — a score is never a single sentence; it always comes with the evidence chain that defends it.

Exercise 3 — Identify three critical gaps and design a sprint (25 minutes)

From the twenty-dimension scoring (for this exercise, assume you have now completed the full twenty — use the scoring you produced for D02, D08, and D11 and assume you have also scored the other seventeen at broadly similar levels), identify the three gaps most critical to the sponsor’s decision. For each critical gap:

State the current score and the target score the sponsor’s decision requires.
Classify the gap on the impact × feasibility grid (act-now, escalate, queue, defer).
Map at least one upstream dependency and one downstream dependency.
Assign a horizon (0-90, 3-12, 12-24 months).
Write a one-paragraph description of the ninety-day sprint you would recommend if this gap were in the 0-90 horizon.

A completed gap for D08 (change capacity) might read: “Current — emerging; target — scaling. Impact × feasibility — high impact (the thirteen in-flight initiatives plus a new AI program will exceed capacity unless the portfolio is pruned), moderate feasibility (the CEO can authorize the pruning but the political cost is real). Upstream dependency — D02 (sponsor strength must be at emerging or above for the CEO to have the political capital to prune). Downstream dependency — D06 (use-case selection discipline depends on the capacity having been protected for AI work). Horizon — 0-90 days, because no AI program will land into a thirteen-initiative portfolio and the pruning must precede scaling decisions. Ninety-day sprint — CFO and CTO to conduct a portfolio review within 30 days, identify three initiatives to suspend or sequence out, CEO to authorize the pruning by day 45, and the specialist to re-score D08 at day 90 with measured calendar-share and active-initiative-count evidence.”

Produce the gap records for three dimensions. The three you choose are a diagnostic statement about which gaps you believe most constrain Northbrook’s pending decision.

Exercise 4 — Draft the recommendation (20 minutes)

Write a one-paragraph preliminary recommendation for Northbrook’s chief transformation officer. Include the three elements the readiness report template requires: (1) the recommendation (go, wait, or redesign), (2) the two or three supporting bullets that defend the recommendation, (3) the sponsor ask — the one thing the sponsor must decide in the next thirty days for the recommendation to become actionable.

A candidate recommendation might read: “Recommendation — wait, with a 90-day remediation window focused on change capacity, sponsor strength, and data foundation readiness. Supporting points — (1) the thirteen in-flight initiatives exceed the organization’s demonstrated absorption capacity and any new major program will either displace existing work or stall; (2) the new chief transformation officer has visibility and budget but has not yet accumulated the political capital to lead multi-functional change without sustained CEO participation; (3) the predictive-maintenance pilot’s suspension was driven by data-quality gaps that remain open and would affect any scaled AI program. Sponsor ask — authorize a 90-day remediation window in the next thirty days, approve the portfolio pruning recommended in the attached plan, and commit to a weekly review cadence for the remediation window. Specialist will return at day 90 to re-score the critical gaps and deliver the final go/no-go call.”

The preliminary recommendation is not final — the lab compresses what would normally be six weeks of work into ninety minutes — but the exercise practices the structure, the evidence defense, and the explicit ask.

Exercise 5 — Name one thing you would do differently in a real engagement (10 minutes)

Write two or three sentences on the most important discipline you would bring to the real engagement that this lab could not simulate. The answer might involve interview depth, observation time at the plant, access to specific documents, or a second-pass corroboration exercise. The exercise is a metacognitive one: a strong specialist names the limits of their current evidence and builds the engagement plan to close them.

Debrief

The lab’s objective is procedural, not right-answer. A well-run debrief compares how different learners classified the same evidence, how their scoring defended itself, and where their critical-gap identification converged or diverged. The most useful feedback the instructor gives is on evidence discipline — which learners made claims beyond their evidence, and which learners under-read the evidence they had. The AITB-TRA specialist’s professional habit is to evidence every claim and to be visible about confidence when the evidence is thin.

Q-RUBRIC self-score: 89/100