07New owners, new roles
Content owners, accountability for wrong answers, a product owner from the business, and experts at the centre.
Each previous chapter ended on a decision: which document is true, what error is acceptable, when to stop. Decisions need owners, and a GenAI project quickly shows which ones the organisation lacks.
Who owns the knowledge, and who answers for it
In our rail maintainer, documents have authors but rarely owners; experienced people kept the whole consistent in their heads. The project needs that role made explicit: for each engine family, someone from maintenance or engineering, not IT, who decides which document is authoritative and resolves contradictions. Otherwise the system will faithfully repeat the organisation's inconsistencies.
Sooner or later, the system will give a wrong answer and someone will act on it. Accountability must be settled before that happens. A notice saying "answers may contain errors" transfers nothing: the organisation chose to put this tool in its technicians' hands, and within it, the business owner who approved the Definition of Done is accountable.
A product owner, and experts at the centre
Scrum's product owner decides what the product should do and in what order. Here the product is reliable access to maintenance knowledge, so the product owner should come from maintenance: someone who knows which engine families matter, which questions technicians ask, and what a wrong answer costs. If nobody from the business can take on this role, the project is not ready to start.
Experts, usually consulted at the beginning and the end, are needed throughout: as sources, as authors of the test set, as judges of every cycle. Their time must be allocated and protected, and for those close to retirement, scheduled before they leave. The human side matters too: an expert asked to pass their knowledge into a system may fear being made redundant. Their contribution should be recognised for what it is, preserving what they built over a career.
Technicians, in turn, become contributors: every answer they flag feeds the next cycle. Newcomers deserve particular attention, since they are the least able to spot a doubtful answer. And legal, data protection, staff representatives and safety, who usually approve projects at the end, must be involved from Crawl. Each can stop a project late; involved early, each can help shape it.
| Role | In a classic IT project | In this project |
|---|---|---|
| Business owner | Approves the business case | Approves quality thresholds and stage decisions; accountable for wrong answers |
| Product owner | Often from IT | From maintenance; owns priorities and accepts each cycle's work |
| Content owners | Rarely exist | One per engine family; decide what is true |
| Experts | Consulted at start and end | Sources, test authors and evaluators throughout |
| CTO / CIO | Define and deliver the solution | Make the business decisions explicit; build the instruments that support them; own the path to production and the platform |
| Technicians | End users | Users and contributors of feedback |
| Legal, data protection, staff representatives, safety | Approve at the end | Involved from the first stage |