Agentic Workflow Launch Checklist (Production-Ready in 30 Days)

Goal: ship ONE workflow that produces measurable business value, with auditability and rollback.

1) Choose the workflow (Day 1–3)
- Write the job statement: “When X happens, the system should do Y, so Z improves.”
- Confirm volume: target at least 200 tasks/week so ROI shows up quickly.
- Confirm value: estimate baseline human minutes per task and fully loaded hourly cost.
- Define strict boundaries: what the agent must do, and what it must refuse.
- Pick a success metric: e.g., cost per resolved ticket, invoices processed/day, SLA compliance.

2) Define controls (Day 4–7)
- Decide autonomy level: read-only → suggest actions → bounded writes → full autonomy.
- Implement action policy: thresholds (e.g., refund <= $50), allow/deny lists, and required approvals.
- Add identity + permissions: least-privilege OAuth scopes, per-tenant isolation, secret rotation.
- Add an emergency kill switch and a rollback plan (who flips it, what happens next).

3) Build tool contracts (Day 8–14)
- For each tool/API call, define a schema (inputs, outputs) and validate it.
- Add idempotency keys to prevent double-writes.
- Add rate limits, timeouts, and retry rules (with caps to avoid runaway loops).
- Log every action with: timestamp, actor (agent/version), tool, parameters, response, and outcome.

4) Create evaluation and QA (Day 10–20)
- Build a “golden set” of 200–1,000 representative cases (real, anonymized).
- Define pass/fail criteria per case (not just “looks good”).
- Run evals on every change: prompt edits, model swaps, retrieval updates, connector changes.
- Set target quality: >=95% correct on in-scope tasks BEFORE ramping autonomy.
- Establish a human QA queue for exceptions and unclear cases.

5) Instrument ROI (Day 15–25)
- Track: tasks attempted, tasks completed, escalation rate, rework rate, latency, cost per task.
- Compute “effective automation rate”: completed correctly with no human rework.
- Produce an ROI report template: baseline cost vs automated cost, dollars saved, and error costs.
- Set a margin target: aim for >=70% gross margin at steady state (after retries + QA).

6) Pilot and ramp (Day 21–30)
- Canary launch at 1–5% traffic or a single queue/region.
- Monitor MTTD (detect failures fast): target under 10 minutes for critical workflows.
- Ramp in steps (5% → 20% → 50% → 80%+), pausing if rework spikes.
- Hold a weekly “workflow review”: top failures, new edge cases, updates to policies and eval set.

Operational cadence after launch
- Weekly: refresh the golden set with new edge cases; review cost and failure clusters.
- Monthly: security review of scopes, tokens, logs, and retention settings.
- Quarterly: model/provider benchmarking; renegotiate pricing based on measured outcomes.

Definition of done
- You can explain (in one page) what the workflow does, what it will not do, and why.
- Every action is logged and replayable.
- There is a clear approval path for high-risk actions.
- The ROI report is auto-generated and shareable with finance/procurement.
- A rollback takes minutes, not hours.