Decision doors - how does your business representative make decisions.

No, I'm not talking about a 60's rock band, who lost their front man way too early, although that might be one of the reasons for their legendary status.

Walking through the hallway of the building complex in which I work, I somehow got annoyed with the automatic doors which has been installed over the last couple of years.

Previously the doors were either manual or semi automatic, meaning you had to press a button to open them.

Many doors in the building complex are now equipped with sensors, so they open automatically. Very convenient in many situations, but in the upgrade process, the opening mechanism has also been made slower.

Previously the door would open at you command, either because you decided how hard to push a manual door, or when you pushed the button, it would open in a "yes sir" fashion. The "yes sir" refers to a swift quick opening, letting you pass through.

Now the door opens in more "let me see.....yes i'll open" way, resulting in, even though it is equipped with a sensor, you have to stop and wait for the door to open.

I don't know if this has been done because someone actually was hit by a fast opening door, but I have never heard of such an accident.

Now, I'm not on a mission with doors to attribute human feelings or decision making to the doors in the building, but they got me thinking about ways to think about decision making and especially how to react on request for decisions. See, now we are getting nearer to the business analysis world. 

Because many might not know the doors in the building complex where i work, I will try to use a couple of more widely known examples from the world of movies. Especially science fiction movies have a thing about doors.

In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the doors in the spaceship were equipped with an especially pleasing sound, letting you know that they were happy to open for you. (Which annoyed Marvin the depressive robot immensely, but that's another story). Now that's the sort of business representative I would like to have as a BA. One who says, we are happy to help you with your decisions or issues.

Another great example is the Star Wars movies, where buildings and spaceships have many creative door solutions. Some of the them seems rather over-the-top and elaborate. This is not what I want from my business representative, I need them to help me make a decision, not to design an elaborate decisions process involving to many stakeholders. It might look fancy, but takes forever.

My favorite example from Star Wars is a door when Luke Skywalker and Han Solo enters cloud city (In the Empire Strikes Back) there is a control room, where the door opens and closes almost instantly. Now thats the kind of business representative I would like, especially in a case with a tight schedule. A "I'll get right on it" attitude.

I'll leave it up to the reader to interpret what the many blast doors in Star Wars would relate to in a business representative.

I'm sure that there are many other examples out there of good and not so good doors.

I guess the morale here is to make sure that you observe how your business representative or other decision making partner, is going about the way of getting the decisions made. And if it is not going as you would like, be sure to talk to them about your expectations.

Now, I'll go and see if a can tweak the opening mechanism a bit...

Oh, by the way. If you're interested in more about doors and their apparent human like characteristics, I can highly recommend reading Bruno Latour - Where are the Missing Masses? Sociology of a Door

Stick to the plan or re-plan on the fly?

First of all, sorry for the lack of updates, but this thing called work seems to have been occupying a fair bit of my time recently, but now I'm back.

For this post, the inspiration actually came from the department to which I am currently allocated, which have been working with improving meeting efficiency. One point is the preparation of a meeting/workshop, which among other things requires the preparation of an agenda, topics to be discussed etc. Usually it is good meeting etiquette to stick to the agenda, make sure that there is time for all parts of the agenda and so forth. These are all sound priciples, but...

I think everyone knows the dilemma, stick to the plan or go of in another direction? It occurs daily to all of us, whether we were just on our way to the grocery store and "accidentally" stepped into our favorite clothing store, or we were on our way home, and decided to take another route to avoid traffic even though it might be a longer drive. (I know, I know. I promised, no more traffic metaphors!)

In the world of business analysis, it is not uncommon that a meeting gets "high-jacked" by someone with a different agenda, and the question is then how do we handle this? The answer is of course a clear cut: Well, it depends...

To keep it simple, I see three basic outcomes of our decision:

1: We fend of the high-jacking attempt and return the originally proposed agenda, but not being pirates, we also make a decision on how to handle the issues brought up as the alternative agenda.

2: We declare a ceasefire, ending the current meeting/workshop and convene at a later point in time to discuss the new situation.

3: We declare us beaten by the high-jacking and change our agenda to accommodate the new information.

No strategy is better than the other, per see, as they are highly situation dependent.

So how do we as the meeting leader/facilitator decide which strategy to use? I see four important parts which have to be taken into consideration.

A: Are the meeting participants the right ones to discuss and make decision on the new agenda?

B: Is the necessary information present, both with the meeting participants and are documents etc. to be discussed available ?

C: Am I as the meeting leader/facilitator prepared to/capable of changing the agenda?

D: Does the information in the "high-jacking" render the current agenda useless?

Based on this we can make a decision:

In order to change the current agenda, we need to be able to answer yes to A, B and C. Otherwise we cant continue the meeting with a new agenda. If we answer yes to D we only have option 2 left.

If we answer no to A, B or C, we can choose between options 1 and 2. Here question D becomes the tie-breaker. If we answer yes to D, we should end the current meeting and convene at a later point in time when we have the necessary information or attendants.

I have tried to illustrate it in the figure below:

While question A, B and D are quantifiable, question C is tricky and a point where the meeting leader has to be honest with him-/herself and the other participants.

As the meeting leader it is hard to announce that you are not capable of continuing the meeting, even though the necessary people and information is present. I do however think it is better to make the decision to postpone the meeting rather than continuing with a meeting where we are unsure of the outcome because we don't now whereto or how to steer our ship.

Continuing without a captain can cause worse results than dropping the anchor and make sure we have the right position and direction.