Everyone is an exception

There are no exceptions to the rule that everybody likes to be an exception to the rule.”
Charles Osgood
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When it comes to customer experience management at a CSP, Charles Osgood’s statement rings true. A friend of mine recently talked about the challenge of solution design where “Everyone is an exception.”

When it comes to designing OSS systems and processes, too many engineers / analysts treat Osgood’s statement as gospel, that every single exception has to be handled as part of the rule.

There are too many OSS that have the rule (ie the ~80% of cases in Pareto’s 80/20 rule) bogged down by designing processes to handle all the exceptions (ie the 20% of cases).

My preference is to streamline the normal (ie the 80%) and hand off exceptions to special resolution processes. I also try to suggest / impose ruthless simplification and standardisation where possible to ensure that there are less variations of exceptions to be handled.

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