James Taylor's Decision Management

Today's post is about decisions. In particular about the kinds of decisions that you should be looking for. This divides into two lists - characteristics of suitable decisions and ways of classifying decisions so you can find them in your processes. Characteristics for decision management first:

• Decisions with lots of rules
• Decisions that change often
• Decisions that require automation and real business domain knowledge
• Decisions that should be based on historical analysis
• Decisions that involve calculating risk for an individual transaction
• Decisions that should be personalized to a specific customer

There's more but those will get you started. Bear in mind we are not talking about big, one-off strategic decisions here – should we do business in Alaska, say – but on the decisions that relate to specific individuals, customers, members. These decisions  can and should be identified, externalized and managed. There are a number of different ways to find these decisions and the four most common are:

• Look for micro decisions
  Organizations do not realize how many they make and every strategic decision has many operational consequences. Each customer interaction can be many decisions, for example, and strategies can require thousands of decisions to be made appropriately if they are to be implemented successfully. These are micro decisions.
• Manual decisions
  Many decisions are hidden under manual processes - decisions that are being taken every day by front-line staff based on policy manuals, best practices or guesswork.
• Conflicting decisions
  Different parts of your organization often treat customers differently because they have not identified a decision appropriately. Decisions are rarely meant to be made inconsistently so inconsistent behavior normally means that there is a decision to identify.
• Missing or default decisions
  Decisions that you do not think you can take and so you do the same thing every time or situations where the policy was set a long time ago and was never updated

Finding the decisions that drive your operations is a critical first step.