Record the reason for rejection
When a request is refused, record the governing constraint, so repeated unmet demand becomes visible instead of anecdotal.
- Evidence
- Hypothesis. Specify's argument, untested by us or anyone else we can cite. Treat it as a position somebody should try to falsify.
- Difficulty
- Moderate. Difficulty is an initial editorial assessment of how much work an idea usually takes, not a guaranteed estimate for your systems. A change that is small in one storefront can be significant in another because of where the data lives.
The commercial problem
Refusals happen in conversation, in inboxes and in individual judgement. The business knows it says no often. It cannot say what it says no to, how often, or whether the reason is still true.
Why it matters
A reason recorded once is an administrative detail. The same reason recorded two hundred times is a business case, and it is the only way to tell an appropriate refusal apart from a Premature No that nobody re-examined.
Where it applies
- Businesses where sales staff decline requests by judgement
- Any automated rule that can reject a configuration
- Quotation processes with a no-bid decision
Suggested implementation
- Define a small closed set of refusal reasons. Free text will not aggregate and a long list will not be used.
- Record the reason at the moment of refusal, in the tool where the refusal happens.
- Include whether the constraint is permanent, conditional or simply unmodelled. The third is the interesting one.
- Review the aggregate against what production can currently do, not against what it could do when the rule was written.
Risks and constraints
- Staff will not adopt a step that adds work without visible benefit. Show them the aggregate.
- A closed list guarantees a wrong-but-close option gets picked. Include an escape hatch and read it.
- Refusal data can be read as staff performance measurement, which will corrupt it immediately.
What to measure
- Proportion of refusals with a recorded reason
- How many refusals cite a constraint that turns out to be out of date
- Volume of demand behind the most common reason
How this relates to Specify
This is Premature No analysis and the Opportunity Ledger: a refusal made without sufficient information is the thing both exist to surface.
Related ideas
Start with evidence
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