Authority Before Action

What this phase establishes

APQC captures and authorizes the business outcome the transformation must achieve, as a bounded, traceable intent. That intent scopes everything downstream, including the definition of which assets are “relevant” for discovery.

Normative source: APQC Lifecycle, Stage 1 — Intent Established.

What goes in

• A stated goal, and the authorizing party behind it.
• Its constraints — scope, budget, deadlines, regulatory drivers.
• Its risk tolerance.
• A signed human intent, with the scope being requested.

Who holds this authority

The authority to set intent is the highest-level grant, and all later authority derives from it. This authority is not delegated by the system; it enters from outside it — a human authorizer or a governing body.

Everything the conversion agent is later permitted to do traces up a delegation chain to that root.

What Agent-008 does here

Agent-008 governs the conversion agent before it touches anything — every change gated and replayable. APQC coordinates the governance transition; it does not decide whether an action is authorized.

The grant issued at this phase is the read-and-observe authority that Discovery requires. Asset-bound delegations are completed once the estate is known, and are made explicit again when you commission execution.

The full model: The Agentic Authority Model.

What comes out

• A governance regime established, with grants scoped, bounded and revocable.
• A signed intent record binding who authorized what outcome, when, and under what constraints.
• Scoped, time-bounded, revocable grants, each bound to a class of action on a class of asset, each traceable to the intent root.
• Delegation records binding who delegated what to whom, on which assets, within what bounds, and revocable by whom.

If this phase fails

If the intent is unbounded, unauthorized or implicit, or the grant cannot be scoped, the lifecycle halts. No discovery scope is granted, and the transformation returns to intent re-authorization. There is no path around this step.

Endpoints