Sponsor and Stakeholders
| Sponsor | Jad Shamseddin, Chief Operating Officer |
| Point person | Fiona Stewart, Senior Director Special Projects. Working sessions run with Fiona; she brings others in as needed. Annette van Hout, who owns the library's formatting and production, alongside. |
| Aleph experts | Marc Matar, Vice President Food and Beverage (F&B), whose new F&B manual is a key source and who is setting out the category structure the F&B procedures should follow, outlet by outlet · Estel, Vice President Learning and Development · the regional training directors · the property teams at Michlifen and Marchica, who validate operational accuracy and complete the property detail |
| Owner side | The M&M ownership and its asset-management team, indirectly; they receive no access to the library, a list at most, and every procedure carries its Aleph ownership notice |
| Delivery | Caroline Hardman and Nitin Thariyan, Deep Hospitality; Caroline leads this module |
Goal Statement
To give Aleph a repeatable, AI-driven method that turns its existing generic operational procedures into property-fitted standards for Michlifen and Marchica, and to prove that method end to end on a small, evidence-chosen set.
Deep Hospitality builds the method – the document architecture, the adaptation logic, the quality bar and the validation steps – and demonstrates it on a few Category A procedures taken all the way through: the adapted standard, plus the training and checking material that makes it live. Aleph names an internal or property-based lead to run the method across the wider set, with the property experts confirming each procedure is operationally right before it is approved. This engagement builds Aleph's capability to complete the wider Category A set in step with its own programme milestone; it does not commit Deep Hospitality to writing or adapting the full library for both properties within this scope. Confirmed across both scoping sessions: this is customisation of the existing library, not a generic rewrite, at the level a guest would meet at a Leading Hotels of the World member, with Forbes certification under exploration.
How the Method Works
The method brings four things Aleph already owns into one place and lets the evidence decide where to start, so no effort is spent adapting a procedure that is already sound.
- Take the existing procedures as the foundation – the library Aleph has built, treated as the source, never discarded.
- Set them against the global luxury standards, Leading Quality Assurance (LQA) and Forbes, and against each property's own positioning and brand voice.
- Read the guest evidence – the mystery guest findings, guest satisfaction feedback and public reviews – to see where the experience is actually falling short, property by property.
- Produce a gap view that shows, procedure by procedure, what is covered and what is missing, and points to the handful where the evidence is loudest.
- Adapt those procedures inside the library's existing layout, with the additions clearly marked, so the change is honest and easy to follow – then bring each one to life beyond the page: a short training piece and a simple way to check it is being done.
In Scope
- Confirm the document architecture, structure and index, building on how the library is organised today – its numbering, its manual fronts, its issue to the units – not replacing it
- Stand up the method above as a repeatable workflow, with the prompts, quality checks and approval steps written down so it can be run again without us
- Select the proof of concept by evidence: a few Category A procedures from one agreed division and property, chosen where the guest evidence and the standards gap are loudest [division and property settled as the proof of concept is agreed]
- Take that set all the way through: the adapted standard in the existing layout with additions marked, plus the training piece and the check that make it live
- Each property's positioning woven in from the vision deck, the brand positioning material and the properties' own guest evidence
- Train a nominated Aleph or property champion to run the method, and set out how the property experts review and sign off operational accuracy before anything is approved or issued
- Hand over the method so Aleph can extend it across the rest of the Category A set, the second property, and future properties
- English master documents; the existing professional French aligned rather than redone; where new French is produced, independent professional certification is available as a separately priced step
Out of Scope
- Writing, adapting or validating the full Category A set for both properties within this engagement; if Aleph wants that, it is a separately scoped production lane with its own volume, sources, review and terms
- A complete set of procedures written from scratch for the wider portfolio, tiered by three, four and five star and by resort or city hotel; that ambition came up at the F&B session and is a larger piece of work with its own sources, volume and terms, to be taken up with Bani and Jad on its own merits
- Acting as the standing subject-matter expert for every Rooms, F&B, Spa or Revenue process; that expertise, and the property detail behind the placeholders, sits with Aleph and the properties
- Detailed customisation for every outlet, role, system or property condition
- Completing or certifying the full bilingual English and French library
- Categories B and C beyond the agreed framework; they follow Aleph's own roadmap
- Admin procedures, the Onomo set, and franchised-hotel procedures
- Building the intranet, an SOP assistant, or the software that would host and run the method day to day; the method, prompts and workflow are delivered here, the system that operationalises them is the later intranet module
- Forbes or Leading Quality Assurance certification itself; the content is written to those standards, certification is sequenced later
Measure of Success
- The proof-of-concept procedures show a clear, credible property-fitted standard, brought to life beyond the document itself
- The method for adapting the rest is documented, repeatable and understood
- A nominated Aleph or property champion can run it
- The property experts know how to validate operational accuracy
- Aleph has a practical route to complete the remaining Category A set without depending on us to produce the full library
Risks and How We Hold Them
- the wider set only gets finished if Aleph names a champion and gives the property experts time to validate; that resourcing is the real constraint, not the drafting, and we ask for the champion to be named as this charter is approved
- this runs in parallel with the Business Review Meeting (BRM) build, a second lane in all but name; the commercial arrangement is settled with Jad alongside the agreement close-out, so neither side is guessing
- these two properties are an exceptional, bespoke effort; the method transfers to the wider portfolio, but the luxury build itself is not assumed to be copied to the branded hotels, which carry their own standards
- AI makes the drafting fast; the value, and the real work, sit in the property fit and the expert validation rounds, and the pace is built around those rounds
- parts of the library are inherited and recycled from other sources; ownership and confidentiality are checked before anything is restructured
- translation is uneven under the surface: the F&B French was a rushed in-house job, and some large checklists and the food-safety files resist translation by how they were built; we confirm what is covered before touching either language
- the procedures stay foundational and the method stays inside Aleph's environment and governance; owners get no access, a list at most, and the properties keep controlled access under Aleph's rules
- known gaps in the source: Rooms and Spa have procedures but no divisional manual, and the new F&B manual is not yet correlated with its older procedures; the architecture step resolves these rather than copying them forward
- the F&B source is thinner than Rooms and carries real gaps, the bar among them, and it is not yet separated by outlet; the gap view names these openly, because writing a missing procedure from nothing is different work from adapting one that already exists
- food safety follows local law: the material we hold reflects practice elsewhere, and a manual written to Moroccan regulation is already being prepared separately, so we confirm which source governs before adapting anything in that area rather than fitting the wrong one
Decisions and Actions Since Agreement
The scope above is agreed and does not change here. This record keeps what has been decided and what is in motion, newest first, so the charter stays the one page that tells the whole story.
- 4 August · The engine was presented and the mandate confirmed. Bani, Fiona and Abdellah Essonni, Regional Vice President (RVP) North Africa, saw the method work end to end: a version 1 standard into a marked-up version 2 with the reasoning behind every change, then the approved clean English and the French. Three procedures are through; roughly 270 remain. Bani confirmed the intent in his own words: the objective is the factory, not just the car. Jad and Neil, travelling, have the recording.
- 4 August · The group-wide question stays a separate piece. Fiona and Bani both pressed towards uplifting the library for Aleph as a whole. The engine as built is deliberately fitted to Michlifen and Marchica; a second engine with generic context is straightforward once this one is proven. Deep Hospitality shapes that as its own proposal, consistent with the out-of-scope line above, and brings it back to Bani and Jad. The hard date holds regardless: ready before the Michlifen season opens in November.
- 4 August · Module 3, the Intranet, opens. Where the engine, its outputs and the wider body of knowledge live is now its own project: taxonomy first, then platform, shaped by an estate that runs Google in some properties and Microsoft 365 in others, with PDF as the format that travels everywhere.
- Actions in motion. Deep Hospitality finishes the fine-tuning and runs the checkout procedure through the engine; Fiona shares the internal priority grading of the procedures with Caroline; the presentation is shared and the recording circulated to Jad and Neil; the incoming cluster training manager, joining 1 September, is the candidate operator for knowledge transfer, with custodianship to be confirmed by Bani and Jad; Bani follows up with the owners personally, and those conversations carry a short flavour of this work alongside the Business Review questions.