Manually over-riding business rules, or dealing with the unexpected
I was reading the other day about a curious incident on a plane flight that involved a problem with the airline's business rules. A passenger had booked a seat for herself and her child, who would sit on her lap, as permitted by the airline's rules. However, the airline refused to fly them as the child was a conjoined twin - it had two sets of lungs and therefore needed two air-supplies in case of emergencies and the aircraft did not have that spare capacity. Hence the business rule that had always been implied - one passenger would only ever require one emergency air-supply - was false.
When trying to model a business, it's probable that you will miss some of the more obscure (and correspondingly less likely) business rules. This is not the "asteroid hit" tiny-probability/huge-impact scenario; there are a multitude of low-probability/low-impact scenarios that, while not necessarily life-threatening, could certainly spoil your customers' day.
I was thinking about how to model this in a manner that did not give an unmanageable multitude of exception conditions. In engineering terms, the common best-practice is to allow for a "catch-all" exception:
- In human-computer interaction modelling via scenarios or use-cases, make use of a default exception flow; when implemented in a system, this may be a work-queue for a supervisor to deal with manually.
- In systems engineering and in real-time systems, there is a succession of fail-to-safe or "limp-home" modes; these can be imagined as concentric circles of smaller and smaller usable subsets of functionality, the smallest of which gives a "minimum stakeholder guarantee", a small portion of functionality that is delivered if all else fails - perhaps an entry in a diagnostic log, or a handover to manual human control.
To return to the airline, the problem was having no available workaround to solve the business-rule impasse, to ensure that all parties were satisfied. In terms of day-to-day business planning, the best idea is to empower your workforce - by providing adequate resources and sufficient personal development - to have the flexibility and confidence to deal with these exceptions when they occur.
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Comments (5)
Leave CommentInteresting post. As usual its all about having well trained enabled personnel and not really about the technology. M
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Good post, but it could be considered to go further than that. Many organisations are now trying to improve Customer Service via systems when sometimes all it takes is a little common sense! This is obviously an every day standard process that has to be right otherwise customers will go elsewhere. This reminds me of a story I once heard about an executive for a hotel chain in the States. The chain spent a couple of million dollars trying to put in place a system that would recognise whether or not a customer had stayed at a particular hotel in the chain before, so they could be suitably greeted on arrival. This was understandably hard and the project was shelved. That same executive then happend to be staying at one of the chains smaller mid-western hotels. He got out of the car, the doorman took his bags and he entered reception, at which point he was greeted by the receptionist with the equivalent of 'Hello Mr. X. glad to see you are staying with us again'. Shocked he asked the receptionist how she knew as he KNEW that there was no way the systems could tell her that as he was one of the executives trying to put that in place. Her response was simple. The doorman asked you if you had stayed here before. He signaled me that you had, so I could greet you correctly. Simple, cost effective and easily implemented. In summary this makes me totally in agreement with the first comment! IT Systems arent always the answer, often having good frontline staff empowered to use their initiative is!
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Have a plan, but be prepared to change it! The issue here was about training and empowerment. Incidentally, a conjoined twin is a person, one of two, therefore consituting two passengers. Perhaps this was overlooked by the parent and or the airline at the point of booking.
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This subject raises an interesting though common conundrum. To achieve a quick return on expensive resources, it is generally wise to employ the 80-20 rule by having a process to handle the obvious and managing the rest as exceptions. The "rest" can then be analysed and the process improved to gradually encompass more. The problem of course is that most over complex solutions are caused by continually adding rules to manage exceptions of rapidly decreasing value. We should know when to stop but achieving perfection becomes a crusade. The whole has to be examined regularly, applying the maxim "if the solution isn't elegant it's probably wrong".
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And this is news? How sad for our 'profession' ...
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