FS-DOC-03Operations
Process Runbook / SOP
New Initiative Scoping and Approval
[YourCompany.com] · Management Department · Prepared by FullSpec · [Today's Date]
This runbook is your team's day-to-day reference for the New Initiative Scoping and Approval process. It describes what the automation handles, what your team does, and how to respond when something goes wrong. FullSpec builds, monitors, and maintains the automated parts of this process end to end. Your team's only active role is completing the structured reviewer assessment and recording the final leadership decision. Keep this document accessible to everyone who submits, reviews, or approves initiative proposals.
01Process overview
Every new initiative at your company, from a product idea to an operational change, now enters through a single structured intake form. Once submitted, three automated agents validate the submission, create a scoping record in Notion, log it to the central tracker, route it to the right reviewer with a deadline, and deliver a daily digest of pending decisions to leadership. The only steps your team performs are the reviewer's structured assessment and the leadership go or no-go decision. Everything else is handled by the automation, removing the back-and-forth email threads, inconsistent templates, and invisible pipeline that slowed approvals to weeks.
Process name
New Initiative Scoping and Approval
Trigger
A team member submits the standardised initiative intake form via Google Forms
Final output
A recorded leadership decision (approve, revise, or decline) logged in Notion and Google Sheets, and a Slack notification sent to the proposer with the outcome and next steps
Agents running
Intake Validation Agent, Scoping and Routing Agent, Approval Digest Agent
Tools involved
Google Forms, Notion, Google Sheets, Slack, Gmail
Weekly volume
8 to 15 initiative submissions per month (approximately 2 to 4 per week)
Human checkpoint
1. Reviewer submits structured assessment via Google Form linked from Notion. 2. Leadership records final decision directly in Notion.
Process owner
[Your name] — Operations Manager or Department Head
Process Runbook / SOPPage 1 of 4
FS-DOC-03Operations
02Step-by-step: what happens and who acts
What you actually need to do: Your team has two active steps in this process. First, the assigned reviewer must complete the structured assessment form linked from the Notion scoping page within three business days of being notified. Second, the founder or CEO must open the daily Gmail digest, review the proposals listed, and record a decision (approve, revise, or decline) directly in each Notion page. Every other step is fully automated.
Step
What happens
Who acts
Type
1
A team member opens the standardised Google Form and submits their initiative proposal, including a summary, strategic rationale, estimated effort, estimated budget, and the departments affected. This replaces informal Slack messages and verbal requests.
Proposer (any team member)
Human
2
The Intake Validation Agent immediately checks the submission against a required field checklist. It verifies that every mandatory field is present and meets a minimum word count. If the submission passes, the agent queues it for record creation. If any field is missing or too brief, the agent sends the proposer a targeted Slack message listing exactly which fields need attention before the process continues.
Intake Validation Agent
Automated
3
Once the submission is confirmed complete, the Scoping and Routing Agent creates a structured Notion scoping page using a locked template. All fields from the form are written directly into the page and a unique reference ID is stamped on the record. The proposer does not need to do anything further at this stage.
Scoping and Routing Agent
Automated
4
The Scoping and Routing Agent writes a new row to the central Google Sheets initiative tracker, recording the reference ID, proposer name, submission date, estimated budget, category, and an initial status of Pending Review. This row becomes the single source of truth for pipeline visibility.
Scoping and Routing Agent
Automated
5
The Scoping and Routing Agent sends a Slack notification to the department manager assigned to this initiative category. The message includes a direct link to the Notion scoping page and a review deadline set to three business days from the submission date. No manual forwarding or chasing is required.
Scoping and Routing Agent
Automated
6
The assigned reviewer opens the Notion scoping page, reads the proposal, and clicks the embedded Google Form link to submit a structured assessment. The assessment captures a completeness score, a resource feasibility flag, and a recommendation of approve, revise, or decline. This is the first human checkpoint and must be completed within the stated deadline.
Assigned Reviewer (Department Manager)
Human
7
The automation platform detects the reviewer's form submission and writes the assessment back to the Notion scoping page. The status field is updated to reflect the reviewer's recommendation. If the recommendation is approve or revise, the initiative is automatically flagged for inclusion in the next leadership digest.
Automation platform
Automated
8
Every weekday morning at 8:00 AM, the Approval Digest Agent checks the Google Sheets tracker for initiatives flagged for a leadership decision. It compiles a formatted Gmail digest listing each pending proposal, the reviewer recommendation, the estimated budget, and a direct link to the Notion page. The digest is sent to the founder or CEO. If no initiatives are pending, no email is sent.
Approval Digest Agent
Automated
9
The founder or CEO opens the Gmail digest, follows the links to each Notion page, and records a final decision of approve, revise, or decline directly in the Notion record. This is the second human checkpoint. The leadership decision field in Notion triggers the next automated step once saved.
Founder or CEO
Human
10
Once a decision is recorded in Notion, the automation platform updates the Google Sheets tracker status to the final outcome and sends a Slack message to the original proposer with the decision, any conditions or revision notes attached, and clear next steps. The initiative record in Notion is locked to reflect the final state.
Automation platform
Automated
Process Runbook / SOPPage 2 of 4
FS-DOC-03Operations
03Handling exceptions
Situation
What the system does
What you do
Proposer submits an incomplete form (missing fields or answers that are too short)
The Intake Validation Agent sends the proposer a targeted Slack message listing exactly which fields need to be completed. No Notion record is created and no reviewer is notified until a complete resubmission is received.
Nothing is required from your team. If the proposer contacts you directly asking for help, direct them to the Slack message from the system, which lists the specific gaps. If the proposer does not resubmit within five business days, the draft is treated as abandoned.
The same initiative is submitted twice, either by the same person or under a slightly different title
The system does not automatically detect duplicates at this stage. Both submissions will create separate Notion records and tracker rows.
The assigned reviewer is responsible for checking the Notion page and the Google Sheets tracker for a similar reference before completing their assessment. If a duplicate is identified, the reviewer should note this in the assessment form and recommend decline with a comment referencing the original record ID.
The reviewer does not submit their assessment within the three-business-day deadline
The system does not automatically send a chase message to the reviewer after the deadline passes. The initiative remains in Pending Review status in the tracker.
The process owner should check the Google Sheets tracker weekly and follow up directly with any reviewer who has an overdue assessment. Contact the reviewer by Slack or email and ask them to complete the assessment form linked from the Notion page. If no response is received after a further two business days, escalate to the department head.
Leadership does not record a decision after receiving the digest
The Approval Digest Agent will include the same initiative in the next day's digest and every subsequent digest until a decision is recorded in Notion. The tracker status remains flagged for decision.
If a proposal has appeared in three or more consecutive digests without a decision, the process owner should raise it directly with the founder or CEO. This is not a system failure. It indicates a capacity or priority issue that requires a human conversation.
A category is selected in the intake form that does not match any reviewer in the routing table
The Scoping and Routing Agent cannot identify an assigned reviewer and will not send a Slack notification. The Notion record is still created and the tracker row is logged, but the status will show Routing Error.
Contact FullSpec at support@gofullspec.com to add or update the routing rule for the missing category. In the meantime, the process owner should manually notify the appropriate reviewer by Slack and ask them to complete the assessment form linked from the Notion page.
A connected tool is unavailable, such as Notion, Slack, or Google Sheets experiencing an outage
The automation platform will retry the failed action up to three times over a fifteen-minute window. If all retries fail, the run is paused and a failure alert is logged. The process does not silently drop the submission.
Check the status of the affected tool at its official status page. If the outage is brief, the automation platform will resume automatically once the tool is restored. If the outage lasts more than two hours, contact FullSpec at support@gofullspec.com for a manual recovery. Do not attempt to re-trigger the form submission, as this may create duplicate records.
04Who to contact and when
Fill in the rows marked with placeholders once your team is confirmed. The FullSpec rows are fixed and do not need to be updated. Share this completed table with anyone involved in submitting, reviewing, or approving initiative proposals.
Role
Name
How to reach them
Process owner (Operations Manager)
[Your name]
[Your email or Slack handle]
Leadership approver (Founder or CEO)
[Your name]
[Your email or Slack handle]
Primary reviewer (Department Manager, category 1)
[Your name]
[Your email or Slack handle]
Primary reviewer (Department Manager, category 2)
[Your name]
[Your email or Slack handle]
Routing table administrator (person who updates reviewer assignments)
[Your name]
[Your email or Slack handle]
FullSpec builder (for build changes, configuration updates, and technical issues)
FullSpec team
support@gofullspec.com
FullSpec support (for errors, outages, and general questions about the automation)
FullSpec support
support@gofullspec.com
Process Runbook / SOPPage 3 of 4
FS-DOC-03Operations
05Ongoing maintenance
Any time a new initiative category is added or an existing one is renamed
Update the category list in the Google Form and notify FullSpec at support@gofullspec.com so the routing table in the automation platform can be updated to match. If the form and the routing table fall out of sync, new submissions in that category will produce a Routing Error status.
Process owner, with FullSpec support
Any time the Notion scoping page template is changed
Notify FullSpec before making changes to the locked Notion template. The Scoping and Routing Agent maps directly to specific fields in that template. Renaming, removing, or reordering fields without updating the agent configuration will cause record creation to fail or populate the wrong fields.
Process owner notifies FullSpec; FullSpec updates the agent field mappings
Monthly spot-check (first Monday of each month)
Open the Google Sheets tracker and check for any rows that have been in Pending Review or Flagged for Decision status for more than ten business days. Follow up manually with the relevant reviewer or leader. Also check that the Approval Digest Agent has run on all expected weekday mornings by reviewing the sent items in the Gmail account used for digests.
Process owner
Weekly error-log review (every Monday morning)
Check the automation platform's run history for any failed or paused runs from the previous week. A failed run will show a red status against the affected step. If you see repeated failures on the same step, contact FullSpec at support@gofullspec.com with the run ID and the date. Do not attempt to replay failed runs without guidance.
Process owner, with FullSpec support for any failures
Any time a reviewer, approver, or process owner changes
Update the contact table in this runbook. For reviewer changes, update the routing table in the automation platform by contacting FullSpec at support@gofullspec.com. For leadership approver changes, confirm the Gmail digest recipient address is updated in the Approval Digest Agent configuration.
Process owner notifies FullSpec; FullSpec updates the configuration
Quarterly volume review (every three months)
Check whether submission volume has grown significantly beyond 15 per month. High volumes may require the daily digest to be restructured or the reviewer routing table to be expanded. Review the before-and-after metrics (approval cycle time, scoping completeness, leadership review time per week) to confirm the process is still performing as expected. Share findings with FullSpec if configuration adjustments are needed.
Process owner, with FullSpec if changes are required
The single most common maintenance issue for this process is the initiative category list in the Google Form falling out of sync with the routing table in the automation platform. This happens when a new department or initiative type is added to the form without updating the routing rules. The result is a Routing Error status on submissions in that category and no reviewer notification being sent. Always contact FullSpec at support@gofullspec.com before adding or renaming a category in the form.
Process Runbook / SOPPage 4 of 4