Meridian's dispatch-documentation generative-AI assistant has just completed its Business Understanding phase, with a scoped question, defined metrics, and a Go decision. Which phase comes next in the CPMAI methodology?

The six CPMAI phases proceed in a fixed order: Business Understanding, Data Understanding, Data Preparation, Model Development, Model Evaluation, and Operationalization. Having just completed Business Understanding — scoping the question, setting metrics, and clearing a Go/No-Go checkpoint — the next phase is Data Understanding, where the team identifies appropriate datasets, evaluates training-data requirements, and validates ground truth before any data preparation or modeling work begins. The model development phase skips two full phases, Data Understanding and Data Preparation, and represents exactly the kind of phase-skipping the intake material calls 'wrong by construction' absent a stated iteration reason. The operationalization phase is the final phase of the lifecycle and is nowhere near next. The model evaluation phase comes after Model Development, not immediately after Business Understanding. Knowing this fixed sequence — and that skipping ahead without justification is a methodology violation — is foundational to nearly every other Domain II question, since Go/No-Go assessments, phase-specific tasks, and iteration decisions all depend on knowing where in the six-phase order a project currently sits.