Customers and engagements

A standard does not apply to everything an organisation touches. Customers and engagements are how a bar reaches the right products and stops at the boundary of the relationship it belongs to.

A customer represents a party the organisation has a relationship with, and holds the roster of live engagements with them. A customer can be archived when the relationship ends; archiving stops any standard reaching through it, without deleting the history of what applied while it was live.

An engagement is a specific piece of work with a customer, and it carries the set of products it covers. It is open while live and retired when finished — and retiring it ends the reach it provided, in the same way archiving a customer does.

This is what makes customer-scoped standards work. A requirement that applies because of a particular contract should stop applying when that contract ends, automatically, rather than lingering because nobody remembered to unpick it.

Ending reach is not rewriting history. Retiring an engagement changes which standards apply to future reports. Reports already issued stay exactly as issued, under the standard that applied at the time.

A standard reaches a product through one of a few routes: organisation-wide, through a qualifying engagement with a customer, or by a product adopting it directly. Where several routes reach the same target, resolution is deterministic — the same target and the same set of bindings always produce the same applicable standard.

How a bar decides covers the bindings themselves.