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FDE ACADEMY · MODULE 05 · LESSON 01

Find the person who owns the process

Sponsors, owners, users and blockers are four different people who are rarely the same one. How to identify them in the first week and what to do when the process has no owner at all.

Effort
About two hours of conversations, plus half an hour to draw the map.
Skills
change-management

Free and self-paced. No certification is offered.

01Four roles, four different conversations

The sponsor pays and wants an outcome. The process owner is accountable for the work being done correctly and is the person whose approval actually matters. The users do the work and know where it breaks. The blocker — usually security, IT or legal — can stop the deployment and is generally right to ask what they are asking.

Deployments stall when an engineer talks only to the sponsor. The sponsor’s enthusiasm does not survive contact with the process owner’s objection, and the blocker’s questions arrive at the end instead of the beginning.

  • Sponsor — wants the outcome, controls the budget, is not in the detail.
  • Process owner — accountable for the work; can veto quietly and permanently.
  • Users — the only people who know the exception paths.
  • Blocker — security, IT, legal, or the person who runs the system you must integrate with.

02Bring the blocker in first

Take the security and privacy questions to whoever will eventually ask them, in week one, before anything is built. You will lose an afternoon and save a month. You will also frequently discover the real constraint — an existing policy, a prior incident, a contractual commitment to a client — which changes the design while changing it is still cheap.

Arrive with the constraints record from module 01 and the issue list from module 04. Turning up with questions makes you a risk; turning up with a structured list makes you someone they can work with.

03When nobody owns it

Some processes have no owner: they are what is left when three departments each do a part. That is a finding worth stating plainly, because a deployment into an unowned process has nobody to accept the handover, nobody to run the routine and nobody to decide when it is wrong.

The Sprint page says the same thing in its own terms: a problem nobody inside the organisation owns is not suitable, and day one needs the people who do the work. If you cannot find an owner, the first deliverable is agreeing one.

04Do this

PRACTICAL TASK

Map the stakeholders and book the right room

Produce a one-page stakeholder map for your deployment naming real people in all four roles, and secure a session with the people who actually do the work.

What you need

  • A real or realistic engagement
  • The workflow record from module 01, so you know which work you mean

Steps

  1. 01

    List every name you have heard so far and assign each one to sponsor, owner, user or blocker. Names, not job titles.

  2. 02

    Find the gaps. An empty owner row or an empty blocker row is the most important thing on the page.

  3. 03

    Read who this kind of engagement suits and who it does not, and check your situation honestly against both lists.

    Who it is for

  4. 04

    Take one security or privacy question from your module 04 issue list to the blocker this week. Record what you learn that you did not know.

  5. 05

    Book the observation session with the users, not with their manager, and confirm in writing what will be observed and what will be recorded.

    Day 1 — Observe

You are done when

  • All four roles have at least one named person, or an explicit note that the role is vacant.
  • You have met the blocker before any build started, and can quote one constraint you learned from them.
  • The observation session is booked with the people who do the work, with a written scope.

05Where these facts live

This lesson does not restate anything that is already recorded with its evidence elsewhere on the site. These are the pages it leans on.

  • 3-Day AI Deployment Sprint

    Who the engagement suits, who it does not, and why day one needs the people who do the work.

  • Hire an FDE

    What a customer is asked for when they start an enquiry — a useful list of what they will already have thought about.

  • What is a forward-deployed engineer?

    The role as a customer meets it, which is the description a stakeholder will judge you against.

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