Design
The plan the undertaking will be built from.
What should exist, how it works, and in what order. Architecture, structure and sequence, with the decisions that have to be taken before anything is committed.
In short
What it covers
Architecture
The structure the undertaking will run on: what the parts are, what each one owns, and how they meet.
Governance and reporting
Who decides what, on what information, and how often. Boards, delegations, and the reporting line beneath them.
Sequence and dependency
The order the work has to happen in, and the point at which a delay stops being a delay and becomes a failure.
Exposure
We name the single points of failure and concentration before they are tested, and state what the undertaking does when one of them goes.
The specification
What is to be built, to what standard, and how anyone will know it was met.
The problem
Why the effort is front-loaded.
Design failures are not detected when they are made. They are decisions taken quickly, and usually reasonably, and what they remove is not capability but optionality: choices that would otherwise still be open later. The cost of reversing one rises with everything built on top of it.
Next
Design is commissioned first, or on its own.
Most undertakings begin here, whether or not the build follows.