Module 5 • 22 min
Designing Multi-Step Orchestration
Map how steps, tools, systems, and handoffs work together.What This Decision Controls
Orchestration makes the flow between agent actions explicit, including what context moves between steps and where recovery is required.
This decision affects the reliability, cost, governance burden, and operating value of the agent long after the first demonstration.
How to Evaluate It
Treat failure recovery and human handoff as core design elements, not edge cases to discover after launch.
Work from a real workflow and real constraints. A technically possible design is not automatically the right operating design for your organization.
Decision Checklist
- State the business outcome and the bounded task the agent must support.
- Identify the accountable business owner, technical owner, and required human reviewer.
- Confirm the data, integrations, escalation path, and metric required before a build decision.
Worked Decision Scenario
A finance agent receives an invoice exception, retrieves the related purchase order, checks the approval policy, and either drafts a response or sends the case to an analyst. Each step has a defined input, output, tool permission, and recovery condition.
The team maps what happens when a purchase order is missing or a policy check fails. That recovery path is designed before implementation, so the agent never silently completes a high-consequence action with incomplete context.
Apply it
Architecture Exercise
Sketch an orchestration handoff.
Saved locally for this review prototype. Your response will become private account data when the approved course backend is connected.