Under the objective Identify, diagnose, and resolve issues with underperforming prompts and/or poor outputs, workflow optimization must be rooted in evidence-based diagnostics before making modifications to system instructions or prompt chains.

The diagnostic phase requires two prerequisite steps: establishing a quantitative baseline by measuring quality metrics, latency, token spend, and human intervention frequency across recent historical runs (Option D), and conducting a bottleneck analysis to pinpoint the exact sub-steps responsible for performance degradation, excessive token cost, or quality defects (Option B). Implementing changes without these baseline diagnostics leads to blind iterations. Deployment (Option C) and SOP updates (Option E) are downstream execution phases, while leadership notifications (Option A) occur after solutions are verified.