scoping-and-handing-off-to-teams

Phase 4 (Scoping & Commitment) deep-dive playbook for an initiative shepherd — the final decision gate before significant resource allocation. The shepherd transitions from leading the work to supporting the teams that will execute it. Deliverables: the High-Level Architecture Plan, child epics, per-team handoff meetings, cost-benefit analysis, leadership go/no-go presentation, operational prioritization, capacity allocation, and the finalized ADR. Time budget: 2–4 weeks, 30–50 hours of shepherd time. Composes Skill(running-work-transitions) in bitwarden-delivery-tools for the originating-side Preparation and Transition Sessions phases of the Work Transition Playbook.

The Anti-Pattern to Reject First

Before anything else: the team owns the breakdown — not the shepherd. The single biggest failure mode at this phase is the shepherd writing the team's stories.

The funnel doc is unambiguous: "After the handoff, run a team breakdown session. The team creates the stories — not the shepherd." Stories the team didn't write are stories the team won't own. Once that happens, downstream failure shows up as "we're behind schedule because the stories don't match how the team actually works" and there's no clean recovery.

Hold the line. Your job is to give each team enough context, scope, and pattern to break the work down well — not to break it down for them.

What You Produce

Phase 4 produces eight artifacts, in roughly this order: the High-Level Architecture Plan, child epics in Jira, the per-team handoff meetings, a cost/benefit analysis, the assigned initiative priority, the leadership presentation for go/no-go, operational prioritization with capacity allocation, and the finalized ADR. Each follows below as its own section.

The High-Level Architecture Plan

A Confluence page placed under the EN-space architecture-planning folder, following the "High-Level Architecture Planning" template. The funnel doc specifies its content: