Scott Sehlhorst (with whom I have presented and about whom I have written before) had a great post this week called Hidden Business Rule Example. Scott walks through some analysis of a process and shows how finding hidden decisions within that process can really inform how you think about the systems and processes you need. This is similar to a service that we offer and that Neil and I call the Decision Discovery Process. I liked Scott’s example a lot as the decision to do something 100% (or 0%) of the time is a classic hidden decision – people don’t see it as they always/never do something.
I agree with Scott that analysis of the customers who abandon the process would be a great way to find out where to priortize your effort and I would add that if there are multiple ways to make the decision and it is not clear which one will work best then it might be worth using adaptive control to test multiple approaches and track which one is most successful in generating revenue.
A great post from Scott and well worth the read.