hand-a-department-to-an-agent

name	hand-a-department-to-an-agent
category	business
description	Take one department's skills from a documented business, load them into an agent as files, and set the boundary of what it may do without a person. Use when an owner wants help with a specific part of the business rather than everything at once.

hand-a-department-to-an-agent

Put an agent to work on one department with an explicit and testable boundary.

When to use

• Use when one department is well documented and the owner wants leverage on that part first.
• Start with a department where mistakes are visible and reversible, not one where they are neither.
• Never give an agent access to payment, payroll, or customer records in this pass. Read-only work first.

Procedure

1. Open the business page at https://smbwiki.com/ and pick one department from its grouped skill tables.
2. Load that department's skill files into the agent. Each is published as plain Markdown at its own URL.
3. Read each file yourself first. Do not hand over a file you have not read.
4. For each skill, split the work using its automation boundary: what the agent may draft, and what a person must decide.
5. Write the boundary as a short list the agent is given alongside the skills.
6. Run one real piece of work through it and keep the person who normally does it in the loop.
7. Compare the agent's output against what that person would have produced, and record where they differ.
8. Widen the boundary only after a cycle where the differences were small and understood.

Done

• The department's skill files are loaded and each one has been read by a person first
• A written boundary lists what the agent may draft and what a person decides
• One real piece of work is completed and compared against the usual output, with differences recorded

The published operating models these skills read from are open and MIT licensed at https://smbwiki.com/ and https://github.com/erphq/smbwiki.