Building your model from nothing

Your operating model in Claude assumes a map already exists. This page is the other case: your model is empty and you are the one filling it. That is the normal starting point if you signed up through the plugin without a Kowalah engagement. You land in your own organization as its admin, with a root unit and nothing under it. As an admin you are a cross-cutting editor, so you can author the whole map.

If your organization already works with Kowalah, your map is built with your Kowalah team during discovery and the Vision Map Workshop, and you should not start authoring over the top of it. See Operating model setup to work out which case you are in.

Gather before you build

The slowest way to do this is to describe your business from memory. Most of what you need has already been written down by someone in your organization, usually for a completely different reason, and Claude can read it.

Source	What it gives you	Who has it
Org chart export from the HR system	The unit tree, headcount, who leads what	HR or People Ops
The last big systems implementation	Process maps, as-is and to-be	IT, or whoever ran the ERP or CRM programme
ISO, SOX or internal audit documentation	Processes with controls and named owners	Risk, compliance, finance
IT service catalogue	What each function runs on	IT
Job descriptions	Tasks and responsibilities, function by function	HR
Onboarding and training material	How the work is supposed to be done, step by step	L&D and team leads
The month-end close checklist	A finance process already broken into steps	Finance
RPA or automation documentation	The repetitive work, already identified	IT or the automation team
An operating model review from a consultancy	Often most of a map nobody actioned	The executive who commissioned it
Recorded discovery calls	Your own conversations, already transcribed	Your notes or meetings tool

When you ask colleagues for these, ask for the specific artifact rather than the general picture. “Do you have a process map or an SOP for the month-end close?” gets a yes far more often than “tell me how Finance works”. Ask for whatever exists rather than whatever is current: correcting a three-year-old map is faster than authoring from blank.

Point Claude at it

The Kowalah connector is not the only one in your conversation, and that is the point of building here rather than in the platform. Use your other connectors. If Claude already reaches your Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint, your CRM or your call transcripts, let it find the material rather than hunting for files yourself.

Search our SharePoint for anything that looks like a process map, an SOP
or an org chart for Finance, and tell me what you found before reading
any of it in detail.

Upload the rest. Anything not connected, or anything sensitive enough that you would rather it were not in a shared drive, goes straight into the conversation.

What lands where

The document stays in your Claude conversation. What is written into Kowalah is the structure you and Claude derive from it: unit names, process names, the steps, each step’s input and output artifacts, its acceptance criteria and its disposition. There is no upload path into the operating model. No tool in the connector accepts a file, and none stores one. A sensitive SOP, a draft reorganization chart or a set of call transcripts can inform the map without becoming part of it.

Build the org tree

Here's our org chart. Build the unit tree from it, top two levels only,
with the leader and approximate headcount for each. Ask me where it's
ambiguous rather than guessing.

Two levels is usually the right depth to start. Deeper produces a tree you maintain instead of a map you use, and you can push into a unit later when you map its processes. The org chart is the reporting line, not how work flows. Order to cash runs through Sales, Operations and Finance, and the chart will not tell you that. Let processes cross units rather than forcing them into one. Add the units you are not mapping yet anyway. A tree with eight units and one filled in makes the gaps visible, which is what tells you where to go next.

Build a process from its documentation

Here's the month-end close checklist. Turn it into a process under
Finance with its steps. For each step capture what goes in, what comes
out and who does it. Flag anything the document doesn't tell you.

The flags matter more than the steps. A checklist gives you the order of operations and rarely tells you how long a step takes, who covers it when the owner is away, or what happens when it fails. That list of gaps is the agenda for your conversation with the team, and a better opening than an empty page.

Where documentation runs out

Every documented process has undocumented reality around it, and some processes were never written down at all. Talk those through instead:

The checklist stops at "reconcile intercompany". Walk me through
capturing what actually happens in that step. I'll describe it and
you capture it.

Record the real version rather than the documented one. If a step happens in a spreadsheet one person maintains and the SOP says it happens in the ERP, record the spreadsheet. The gap between the document and the practice is usually where the value is.

Then read what you built

Once a function is mapped, the conversations on the main connector page start working: coverage rollups, the redesign backlog, which steps could move disposition this quarter. Those are the questions you built the map to answer.

What the connector will not do here

Delete anything. No unit, process, step or eval can be deleted through the connector
Accept a file into the model. Documents inform the map through the conversation; they are never stored in it
Set Kowalah-side ownership, link processes to deliverables or projects, or wire up implementation links. Those are structural edits your Kowalah team makes on an engagement
Check your map for you. A model one person built is that person’s account of how the business runs. It becomes reliable when the people who own those processes confirm their own, which is what adding them to your organization is for

Your operating model in Claude

Reading, interrogating and refining a map that already exists

Operating model setup

How the map gets built on each route, and setting positions and home units

Available tools

Every connector tool and what it returns

Install the plugin

Add the Kowalah plugin and connector to Claude

Overview

Kowalah Agent

MCP Server

Plugins

Building your model from nothing

Gather before you build

Point Claude at it

What lands where

Build the org tree

Build a process from its documentation

Where documentation runs out

Then read what you built

What the connector will not do here

Your operating model in Claude

Operating model setup

Available tools

Install the plugin

​Gather before you build

​Point Claude at it

​What lands where

​Build the org tree

​Build a process from its documentation

​Where documentation runs out

​Then read what you built

​What the connector will not do here

Your operating model in Claude

Operating model setup

Available tools

Install the plugin

Gather before you build

Point Claude at it

What lands where

Build the org tree

Build a process from its documentation

Where documentation runs out

Then read what you built

What the connector will not do here