Obligatory passage points

Over the last couple of days I have been stuck in traffic on my way to work, due to traffic accidents often many kilometers from where I start my daily journey.
I puzzels me, how a single accident, that even occurred two hours before I left home, is capable of tying up the traffic for a 25 kilometer radius.

As I had plenty of time in the car to nothing but listen to the radio and think about the problem, something came to mind. And right here I have to disappoint you, I do not have the solution to traffic problems in the central part of Zeeland, Denmark, where I happen to live. But, it did however occur to me, that what caused the problem in the first place, is a situation that we need to be aware of as Business Analyst and similar professions.

The problem occurs when an accident happens on or after a particular part of the highway, which collects the traffic from several parts of Zeeland. There are of course smaller roads, which can be used, but as the access to these roads are at the same point as the access to the highway, it usually blocks most of the traffic in the area.

And now, enough about traffic, but it is a good analogy to the work we do when designing new business processes etc.
Usually we design a business process as a highway, where most, if not all, of the "traffic" pass along.

But what if something goes wrong and we have a "traffic" accident? Do we have a backup process in place? What is our "B-road"? Usually there is a manual procedure to be used in emergency situations. But what if the entry to this backup procedure runs through the same passage points as the entry to the highway? Then we might have a situation where both the highway and the b-roads are blocked, not exactly what we intended.

Thus if our highway is important enough, we need to design the "b-roads" in a way that ensures that we can actually by-pass the highway, and not get tied up in a single point of passage.

(On my way to work I Usually have a b-road, that takes me clear of these passage points, but at the moment a bridge is closed completely due to maintenance. The relation of this to the business analysis world, I will leave up to the reader.)

For the more academically interested this is very much built on the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) developed by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, among others. Obligatory Passage Point is a central concept in ANT.

I can highly recommend reading Bruno Latours article "Where are the missing masses - The Sociology of a door". Which desribes the concept of ANT and obligatory passage points.