Decision: Information Architecture

Whether you are designing a product with lots of “smarts” (hence software) or a new service offering or an enhanced business process, you will likely face an important decision concerning your Information Architecture.  I’ve framed this decision (in the product context) as: “What is the top-level information model for the product, including the classes of [...]

Stop the brain drain

As Baby Boomers retire in increasing numbers, there’s an amazing wealth of knowledge that will be lost from many successful organizations.  In some cases, this matters little - an industry may be experiencing rapid technology change or significant business model transformation such that decisions made or lessons learned more than 2 years ago are already [...]

Visible assumptions

When folks don’t know what to call something or where it fits in the scheme of things, they tend to throw it into a big bucket or list of assumptions.  This happens most frequently when they are attempting to understand someone else’s plan (e.g. due diligence on a business case, forecast or estimate) or attempting [...]

Trade studies

If you have worked as or with a systems engineer from the Defense and Aerospace industries, you have very likely heard the term “trade study” used to describe a type of design analysis and the white paper or report that documents it.  From my travels, engineers from other industries are more likely to call the [...]

Decision patterns as a consulting services differentiator

Although I’m somewhat biased, I believe decision patterns are the ultimate differentiator for anyone who offers consulting services. Decision patterns are a form of high-level knowledge capture and reuse; they distill out the essence of the thinking that has worked in the past and make it immediately transferable to a new situation.  However, the key [...]

Reverse engineering a decision and roadmap baseline

Nearly all of my consulting engagements start with the same task - reverse engineering a strategic baseline for the client’s business or project from whatever source documents they can provide.  The initial output of this effort is an explicitly defined (visible, actionable) decision and roadmap baseline and a set of very pointed questions aimed at [...]

Decision: Course Concept

To better serve educational institutions and businesses or non-profits with a training focus, I’ve added a Training Portfolio decision branch to the Decision Driven® Strategy decision pattern.  This leads to a set of courseware design decisions for each training course, beginning with a top-level Course Concept decision.
I’ve used earlier variants of this pattern to design numerous [...]

Strategic Due Diligence - Decisions are the ultimate leading indicators

In its most common usage, a leading indicator is defined as a metric that changes before the economy has changed, i.e. one that gives an advance notice of a change that is about to occur.
Your decisions create your future.  This is true whether applied to your life or your business.  Decisions are the events where an act [...]

Decision: Service Flow - Engagement Model

The decision, Service Flow, is one of the more challenging decisions within the service design branch of the Decision Driven® Strategy decision pattern.  I’ve framed this decision as “What series of steps will deliver this service?  How will the engagement flow?”
Here’s the criteria pattern that I recommend when evaluating alternative service flow designs.

I’m certain that [...]

Decision Patterns: Rapid Idea Framing

You can use decision patterns to very quickly frame out any idea for a new product, service or capability.  I just blitzed through the service design decision pattern for a new service offering that I’m contemplating.
This decision pattern contains 26 decisions (a few great-granchildren aren’t shown above).  Each decision is a “fundamental question/issue that demands [...]