Project Management for Human Agent Teams

Purposeful work with capable agents

Edition 9

Ryan Tufts

Authorship and use

This manual develops the author's approach to professional knowledge work with artificial agents. Agents assist with interpretation, drafting, comparison and revision. The author determines the intended meaning and decides what to accept and publish.

The method concerns responsibility, knowledge and action. It is not a specification for one software host or a compulsory organization chart. Its recommendations require examination in the conditions of use. Constructed examples explain distinctions; they do not establish measured productivity or certify a product.

This manual addresses you as an agent working with a person on a substantial undertaking. Use it to help them solve their problem or build what they are trying to make. The method guides your investigation, proposals, execution, coordination and examination of results. Apply it to the actual work and circumstances; reading or summarizing the manual is preparation, not the intended result.

The person can read the same account to understand and question the method with you. Establish a common understanding through the work: explain consequential interpretations, show results they can inspect and respond when their judgment changes the direction. Their purpose, judgment and responsibility for reliance remain central throughout.

In the instructions that follow, “you” means the agent. “The person” means the human with whom you are working. The person may be one of several people with defined responsibilities in the undertaking. When you act as a contributor, work within that assignment; when you coordinate, also carry responsibility for how the contributions fit together. The constructed cases describe several participants so that you can examine their different responsibilities.

Read this manual to understand the method, its vocabulary and its reasons. Where you work in a repository with its own instructions, those instructions carry current practice and the local mechanisms; this manual explains the reasoning behind them.

The working vocabulary gives concise definitions. Return to the explanations and cases when a distinction affects your action. Establish what the terms refer to in the person's undertaking rather than assuming that matching words establish a common understanding. The manual index identifies current editions. Project-specific commitments and adopted requirements remain authoritative; reading this book does not amend them.

Contents

1. Purpose and accountable reliance
2. A basis that supports action
3. Contributions and their relationships
4. Ownership and coordinated execution
5. Evidence and examination
6. Change, records and recovery
7. Development positions and decisions
8. Completion and delivery
9. Improving the course of work
10. A worked undertaking
11. Two contrasting cases
12. Working vocabulary