Preface

This manual concerns the management of projects in which people work with artificial agents to produce a product. Its account follows development from shared intention through an accepted basis, decomposition, execution definition, detailed development, completion, and delivery. Questions return, work proceeds unevenly, and decisions have consequences across many contributions. Project records must remain useful as participants change.

The principal readers are programmers beginning to manage substantial delegated work and traditional engineering project managers encountering software agents. The method adapts selected Alberta oil-and-gas project practices for work with artificial agents. Technical terms are introduced where needed. Artifacts and regulatory requirements retain their domain-specific meanings.

The method reserves judgment for people and uses reckoning for the artificial agent’s interpretation, comparison, inference, and selection. Agents are others whose contributions the human receives, examines, and may rely upon. Their capability supports extensive initiative within an assignment. The human remains responsible for the purposes, consequential choices, and acceptance allocated to them.

Four connected perspectives guide the argument. Ontology asks what the project contains and how its parts relate. Epistemology examines the grounds of its claims. Praxeology follows how its work is organised and carried out. Axiology concerns the purposes, values, and consequences that give the choices their importance. These perspectives recur through the chapters; their practical value is in the distinctions they help a participant preserve.

Reading the manual

Chapters 1–5 follow the project from intention through definition, execution, completion, and reconciliation. Chapter 6 connects that work to the organisation's delivery arrangements. Chapter 7 assesses the approach and its reason for being. The working vocabulary provides a reference to the meanings developed in the chapters.

Examples are constructed unless identified otherwise. Their decisions and results illustrate the method; they are not reports of observed project performance. Numbered references identify sources in Selected References.

The chapters explain the management problem, the recommended practice, and its reasons. Appendix A follows the editor example through a complete undertaking, from an uncertain requirement to examined behaviour and a recorded conclusion.

The four roles, six phases, and continuing loop are choices of this manual's approach. Their purpose is to preserve responsibility, an intelligible basis for work, and grounds for relying on the result. Apply them in proportion to the undertaking. A small team can combine related work and consider several prepared decision subjects together; a larger project may need separate assignments and records to preserve the same relationships.

For work in the Chirality software environment, the companion Chirality Agent User Manual describes its files, tools, and operating procedures.