Colabmo development course A-P02

Learning objective: Trace a complete redesign argument from evidence to a conditional pilot recommendation.

Fictional teaching case. All organizations, rules, quantities and proposed thresholds in this case are invented for practice. They do not describe Colabmo performance.

The case file

Harbor Services activates standard business service accounts. In a recent sample of 40 completed requests, 12 were returned at least once for missing information and four required an exception decision; the categories can overlap. Median elapsed time from first receipt to activation was eight business days. The sample excludes abandoned and still-open requests, so it does not represent every customer experience. No reliable total staff-effort measure exists.

The current flow is sales email, coordinator spreadsheet, finance review, operations review and activation. Fictional policy P1 requires an authorized service agreement and verified customer identity before activation. It does not name a coordinator spreadsheet or prescribe serial finance and operations checks. Finance must determine account eligibility; operations must confirm service capacity. Whether these checks share a critical information dependency has not yet been verified.

Frame and decompose

The outcome is an eligible, correctly identified customer with an authorized agreement and confirmed capacity, receiving a usable account and clear start information. The boundary runs from first receipt to disposition and communication; complete-input-to-decision is a secondary interval. Rejected and abandoned requests remain visible in reporting.

Necessary functions include capturing the need, establishing identity, confirming agreement authority, determining account eligibility, confirming capacity, deciding exceptions, activating and communicating. The spreadsheet and department sequence are current mechanisms. Preserving the required evidence before activation is a condition on all designs.

Ground the reasoning

The sample supports a missing-information problem in those completed cases. It does not prove that a single form will solve it or that missing information caused all delay. P1 supports the activation condition. The team still needs data on arrival volume, waiting by stage, exception types, repeat entry and information dependencies.

Working principle: because activation commits a service to an identified customer under an authorized agreement, any acceptable design must connect that customer, agreement and capacity decision before activation. A second principle is that unresolved exception decisions must have an accountable owner and a visible disposition. Neither principle mandates serial routing.

Rebuild and compare

Option A keeps specialist roles but uses a shared evidence packet and permits independent checks to start together after completeness review. Option B creates an authorized generalist route for standard cases, escalating exceptions to specialists. Option C lets customers prepare evidence through guided intake while specialists keep the current decision rights. A may depend on shared access and independent checks; B requires verified competence and authority; C depends on customers being able to provide the evidence unaided.

Suppose the team selects A for the first simulation because it changes fewer authority assumptions and directly tests the claimed dependency. This is an illustrative decision, not evidence that A is best. If the checks are genuinely dependent, its main advantage may disappear.

Test and learn

Replay 12 diverse historical cases, including incomplete and exception cases, using the proposed packet and routing. Record whether each decision had sufficient evidence, whether any dependency was missed, and simulated staff actions. Stop the replay design review if an authorization condition is bypassed. A replay cannot establish actual elapsed-time benefit.

Only after resolving the replay findings, propose an authorized live pilot. Illustrative rules: compare median complete-input-to-decision time against a comparable baseline; require at least a 20% reduction to consider expansion; permit no activation lacking P1 evidence; measure total effort and investigate any increase above 10%. These are case-design choices, not universal FPT thresholds. Rare failures and long-term behavior need a larger evidence plan.

No pilot results are supplied. The correct conclusion is a conditional test recommendation with named unknowns, not an achieved improvement.

Practice

Complete W1–W8 for Harbor Services in a small group. Spend 10 minutes finding unsupported conclusions, 15 minutes reconstructing the functions and premises, 15 minutes comparing alternatives, and 10 minutes designing a test. Use the final 10 minutes to challenge another group’s recommendation.

Check your reasoning

Can the 12 returned requests and four exception requests be added to claim 16 unique problem cases?