Outcome Analysis
Outcome analysis focuses on understanding the fundamental outcomes that provide
value to customers. While these outcomes sound as though they should be obvious,
they often aren’t. For example, suppose that you are an insurance company and one
of your customers has just had a car accident. What is the fundamental outcome
from the customer’s perspective? Traditionally, insurance companies have answered
this question by assuming that the customer wants to receive the insurance payment
quickly. To the customer, however, the payment is only a means to the real outcome:
a repaired car. The insurance company might benefit by extending its view of the
business process past its traditional boundaries to include, not simply paying for
repairs, but performing the repairs or contracting with an authorized body shop to
do them.
With this approach, the system analysts encourage the managers and project
sponsor to pretend that they are customers and to think carefully about what the
organization’s products and services enable the customers to do—and what they
could enable the customer to do.