Case Study: Business Aligned Decision Framework Approach Provides a "Disruptive" Enabler for Dramatic Improvements in Business Process Management

While organizations may recognize the importance of Business Process Management, the question is "where is the focus!" Most gated business and engineering processes are focused on the "stop the bleeding" or "go-no go" gate decisions. The decision-centric process that will be discussed in this presentation is focused on the value creating decisions between the gates. Document-based processes focus on document artifacts as the control point (e.g., whitepapers, spreadsheets, PowerPoint's, static models, …) whereas Information/knowledge-based processes (a.k.a. decision-centric processes) focus on value creation and thinking nodes as the control points, where documents are not the focus of the process, but just a view or snapshot into the process. In addition, business, technical, and market requirements that should be driving the process are often incomplete or missing until far into the development cycle. To make things worse, the documents and forms that are used to pass the requirements to the implementation teams are often missing the rationale behind the choices and trade-offs made up-stream, with this resulting ambiguity leading to unnecessary re-work, delay and ultimately escaped defects, being introduced by the implementation teams.

This presentation introduces a Decision Framework that supports this decision-centric process. The method organizes and communicates value-added thinking as "Decision Networks." Decision Networks provide a scalable approach for dealing with the complex relationships among many layers of requirements and solutions.