The No Exception Business Process

One of real challenges with custom software is maintenance after the fact. There are always trade offs being made for cost over flexibility. An example that has been a thorn in my side for quite sometime now are business processes developed with no way to plan exceptional cases by a business user. I think the mistake here is idenification of what type of process you are working on. Software developers look at processes and are inclined to think “technology process” not “business process”. With a “tech process” such as rolling logs or backing up files a developer would be right to have assume no exceptional cases are necessary to be administered by a business user. But a nightly business critical process such as moving approved changes or clearing processing queues needs to able to be administered by business users otherwise there will be duplicated efforts, both a business user and a engineer will need to assist. Identifying proper administration over processes will reduce support cost and produce a system which has the necessary flexibility to support the business process.

Tags: administration, design, process, support