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More succinctly, establish the goals not the tasks. Alan Cooper has an excellent article on goal directed design http://www.drdobbs.com/goal-directed-software-design/1844099...

One example I like is that the goal of the military is peace, but the tasks to achieve that involve war and equipment. It gets real easy focusing on the tasks to the exclusion of the goal.

The other one is double entry book keeping. No one actually wants to enter information multiple times, or even once for that matter. Heck the goals for most software is to use it as little possible to get the goals met as quickly as possible.




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