Sheet 05 · PIL-002
Specification cross-check
Specifications drift from firm standards between revisions, and QA catches conflicts late enough that fixes mean reissued sheets.
Record summary
- Stage
- Active
- Risk pathway
- Structured review
- Data classification
- Confidential
- Participants
- 9
Current status
Active in two offices, week 9 of 16. False positives above threshold; scope tightening in progress with Data & Reporting.
- Next decision
- Continue, modify scope, or pause at the week-16 review
- Where it is decided
- Biweekly pilot check-in, then AI Governance Committee 2026-10-06
The record
- Expected outcome
- Conflicts surface one review cycle earlier, with a false-positive rate low enough that reviewers keep using it.
- Business owner
- Alan Petrov, QA Lead, Structural Practice Group
- Program coordinator
- AI Program Manager — coordinates and records; does not approve
- Participating teams
- Structural Practice Group
- Tool
- Cadence Search — Cadence Data Systems TL-02
- Originating use case
- Specification cross-check against internal standards UC-003
- Related decisions
- DEC-2026-03
- Start date
- 11 May 2026
- Decision date
- 06 Oct 2026 (in 34 days)
- Cost to date
- $6,200 — licensing, vendor fees, and third-party support. Participant time is not included and is the larger cost.
Measures
Defined before the pilot started. That is what makes a result a finding rather than an opinion formed afterwards.
| Measure | Target | Current | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conflicts identified per review | At or above the manual baseline of 3.1 | 4.4 across 26 reviews | Measured |
| False-positive rate | Under 20% | 31% | Measured |
| Reviewer willingness to keep using it | Majority yes | 5 of 9 yes, 4 conditional on fewer false positives | Self-reported |
What the pilot has surfaced
Open questions and lessons sit here rather than in a closing report, because they are what the next pilot needs and the next pilot starts before this one ends.
Open questions
- Can the false-positive rate reach 20% by tightening the comparison scope, or is the ceiling structural?
- Does the tool miss conflict types that manual review catches? The missed-conflict analysis is not finished.
Lessons learned
- Reviewers tolerate false positives up to a point, then stop opening the report. The threshold matters more than the average accuracy.
- Most false positives came from superseded revisions that were never retired from the library. A data problem, not a model problem.
Guardrails and dependencies
Guardrails
- Advisory output only — the tool never edits a specification
- A licensed engineer adjudicates every flagged difference
- Limited to two offices during the pilot
Dependencies
- Standards library revision tagging (owner: Data & Reporting)
- Cadence Search conditional approval remains valid through EXC-02