Step 09 of 12 · 25 min
Benchmarking and readiness
Chapter 7 of Quantum Readiness for Leaders is the attributed reading. The sequence below is this workshop’s exercise. The book is not copied here.
What the chapter is, and what this page adds
Chapter 7 of Quantum Readiness for Leaders, by Robert Loredo, is titled Prototyping and Proof-of-Concept Development (Packt, 2026). Public tables of contents place that chapter with the work of trying a small application before an organization commits. This page does not reproduce the chapter, its questions, its tables, or its layout.
For Fall Fest, a prototype is a bounded test with the evidence written down before the run. A recommendation may be to stop.
The sequence
Write these in an order that helps the team. The quantum hypothesis may be that a quantum method is not the right fit. That is a useful result, and the Domain/Industry Expert pathway is often the one that can say so.
- Problem. One sentence a newcomer can repeat.
- Current method. How the work is done today.
- Classical baseline. The metric, the instance size, and the score you will compare against.
- Quantum hypothesis. What a quantum step might change, and what would show that it did not.
- Experiment. The smallest run that could inform the hypothesis. Simulator first.
- Metrics. The numbers you agreed to collect.
- Evidence. The files, plots, and configuration that produced those numbers.
- Limitations. What the run cannot support.
- Recommendation. Continue, narrow the question, or stop.
Next-Step Quantum Decision Guide
The project-framing page and the glossary define quantum advantage. This event does not ask you to show it.
The guide below is the live Next-Step Quantum Decision Guide. It loads without an account. Use it for optimization-shaped problems only. Simulation, chemistry, classification, link prediction, and other non-optimization projects stay on the sequence above. Hetionet is classification and link prediction. It is not an optimization result, and it is not a clinical result.
Open the Next-Step Quantum Decision Guide (opens in a new tab)
Charter fields
These fields are the workshop form. They are not a page from the book.
- Problem, in one sentence.
- Problem type: optimization; simulation or chemistry; classification, learning, or data; or not presently quantum-shaped.
- Who has the problem.
- The classical method used today.
- How that baseline will be measured, including the metric and the instance size.
- Success criteria for the bounded prototype, written before any quantum run.
- What you will build this weekend, and what you will not build.
- What you will not claim.
- The evidence that would stop the work.