The objective of this document is to outline a language and structured accounting logic for making and managing promises in order to effectively synchronise work across a distributed organisation and demonstrate to external customers that the organisation can keep our promises.
This language and accounting logic are designed to facilitate a cycle of task decomposition, promise-making & distribution of work, performance of work, re-composition, re-evaluation, re-planning, and subsequent repetition in a dynamic, distributed organisational environment with complex interdependencies between tasks, requirements that change as constraints are discovered, and interplay between research and engineering.
They are also designed to aid individuals and teams working at different levels of abstraction in a project to understand their individual priorities, surface how those priorities relate to the whole picture, and visualize progress at different levels of abstraction.
This language and structured accounting logic are tentatively called "Promise Graph", and often referred to in this set of documents simply as "the system". In the context of this document, "the system" should be understood as meaning exactly "the language and structured accounting logic".
Promise Graph builds on prior art, particularly the Collaborative Web of Galois and Informal Systems' Workflow, and bears some conceptual similarity to Promise Theory and multi-agent coordination.
Next, see design requirements.