Planning Agents
Structure objectives into tasks, dependencies, acceptance criteria, and human decision points.
Give each initiative a scope, an owner, and a definition of done.
THE PLATFORM
The system around
every agent.
Connect business intent, engineering decisions, and runtime evidence through a complete Agentic SDLC.
01 / Define intent
Make the objective executable.
Turn a business request into a delivery plan with explicit requirements, ownership, evidence needs, and cost assumptions.
A reviewable plan before the first tool call.
SDLC & compliance documentation
Connect requirements to design records, review evidence, change controls, and maintenance SOPs.
Support GxP documentation workflows with traceable records and accountable review.
Financial modeling
Model the cost of inference, tools, retrieval, retries, and human review across workload scenarios.
Separate operating assumptions from observed cost.
Connected evidenceWorkflow briefRequirements registerCost assumptions
02 / Design the agent system
Design the whole agent, not just the prompt.
Specify behavior, context, retained information, and the harness that connects the system.
A design with explicit boundaries and dependable context.
Design specifications
Describe intended behavior, interfaces, dependencies, data flows, and acceptance criteria.
Keep implementation choices connected to their requirements.
Harness design
Define model invocation, tool routing, state transitions, stop conditions, and intervention points.
Make the execution environment part of the agent specification.
Knowledge management
Establish source ownership, provenance, retrieval scope, freshness expectations, and access rules.
Give agents context whose origin and permitted use can be inspected.
Memory management
Define what persists between steps or sessions, who can access it, and when it must expire.
Treat memory as a governed resource with a deliberate lifecycle.
Connected evidenceDesign specificationContext & memory policyHarness contract
03 / Connect and execute
Put tools and skills to work, deliberately.
Bring integrations and reusable capabilities into workflows with clear behavior when execution waits, retries, or fails.
An orchestrated workflow with a recovery plan.
Integrated MCP tools
Organize Model Context Protocol tools by capability, ownership, required scopes, and permitted use.
Connect tool discovery with the controls that authorize execution.
Skills management
Version reusable instructions and procedures, with dependencies, owners, and evaluation expectations.
Know which skill revision a workflow used and why.
Workflow orchestration
Coordinate agent tasks, tool calls, human approvals, and handoffs through explicit execution stages.
Make branches, waits, and completion conditions visible.
Durability
Specify checkpoints, retries, idempotency, and resumption behavior for long-running work.
Plan for interruption without silently repeating consequential actions.
Connected evidenceTool & skill inventoryWorkflow definitionRecovery rules
04 / Protect and govern
Make authority explicit at every boundary.
Establish access limits, assess threats, and connect governance decisions to the work they permit.
Clear authority, reviewable risk, accountable decisions.
Auth controls
Define human, agent, and tool identities with scoped permissions and review requirements.
Keep authentication, authorization, and approval decisions distinct.
Threat modeling
Assess untrusted inputs, tool misuse, sensitive data exposure, memory contamination, and recovery abuse.
Link each material threat to a control, owner, and verification method.
Security posture
Review tool exposure, access scope, context handling, dependencies, and unresolved findings together.
Understand security decisions in the context of the actual workflow.
Governance
Assign decision owners, policy gates, evidence requirements, exception conditions, and review dates.
Carry governance from intent through release and ongoing change.
Connected evidenceAccess policyThreat registerDecision & exception log
05 / Evaluate and operate
Turn runtime evidence into the next improvement.
Assess behavior, inspect execution, and feed operational and security findings back into the lifecycle.
Observed behavior that informs accountable improvement.
Evaluation of agents
Version test cases and criteria for task quality, tool use, boundary behavior, and failure recovery.
Connect a release decision to reproducible evidence and explicit exceptions.
Observability
Follow traces, logs, metrics, tool activity, latency, and resource use through OpenTelemetry-aligned instrumentation.
Inspect the path from user intent to the actions that actually ran.
SecOps at runtime
Triage suspicious behavior, assess affected permissions, route incidents, and record containment decisions.
Translate production findings into threat-model updates and regression cases.
Connected evidenceEvaluation reportExecution tracesIncident & improvement records
START WITH INTENTION
Build the lifecycle
around your agents.
Start with a bounded workflow. Define the evidence. Bring the right controls into every stage.