Practice: Add Gates to a Risky Workflow

Unit ID: PAW-M11-U05 Estimated active time: 25-30 minutes

What you are producing

One workflow — ideally the one you mapped in Module 10 — with a privacy gate, a review gate, and stop conditions added, and each tested against a real case.

Choose the riskiest workflow you have

Not the most frequent. The one where being wrong would matter most: something touching a person, a customer, money, or a record.

If you have nothing risky, use a fictional version of one — the structure is what transfers.

Add the three gates

GATED WORKFLOW — (task name)

Step              Who    Gate before it?    What the gate checks
---------------   ----   ----------------   -------------------------
1 gather
2 privacy gate    ____   PRIVACY            categories, substitution,
                                            re-identification
3 generate
4 review          ____   REVIEW LEVEL       from unit 08.00
5 decide          ____   STOP CONDITIONS    any condition true?
6 revise
7 approve         ____   NAMED APPROVER     what they confirm
8 record

Stop conditions for this workflow:  (three to seven)
Alternative route for each:

Test the gates against a real case

Take an actual recent instance of this task and walk it through.

The test is not whether the gates are sensible in principle. It is whether they would have stopped anything, and whether the alternative route was available.

Check the gates are usable

Three questions:

• Can each gate be answered in under a minute?
• Does each stop condition have a route?
• Would a colleague reach the same decision at each gate?

If the answer to the last one is no, the gate is a judgement rather than a rule — tighten it.

What to keep

The gated workflow and the walk-through notes.

This is the sixth portfolio artefact, and it goes into the capstone directly.

Mark complete