The five-step business problem-solving process

- At one point, I worked with a financial services firm, and we had this really cool program that, when we first launched it, was doing really well, both from a customer standpoint and from a financial standpoint. The problem came up when, all of the sudden, the financial numbers started tanking, and everybody started freakin' out. We didn't know what was going on, and it was pretty important for me to solve it because it was a program I was responsible for. So given the complexity of that problem, I used the five-step problem-solving process, and the steps of the process are really simple and straightforward. In the first step, you pin the problem. You define what the issue is, what the goals of the stakeholders are, what previous efforts looked like, and you come out of that first step with a really clear definition of what the problem is. You can't just rush ahead into solving a problem if you don't know what the issue is. Next is identifying all the issues that could be…