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| Criterion |  Operations Bottleneck Analysis |  UX Research Contextual Inquiry |  Decision Making Constraint Analysis |  Decision Making Decision Tree |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | For a flow that backs up at one point, the method looks for the capacity limit with the greatest leverage. It explains why extra effort elsewhere barely improves throughput. | When work processes are known only from accounts and the real context stays hidden, Contextual Inquiry makes behavior at the workplace visible. Observation and follow-up questions together show how people actually work, get interrupted, and improvise. | When an initiative stalls, the limit often lies not in the idea but in hard or soft boundary conditions. Constraint Analysis separates these limits and shows which of them can actually be shaped. | For decisions with follow-on paths and dependencies, a linear comparison is often not enough. A Decision Tree shows how options branch under conditions and which consequences hang on each branch. |
Complexitydifferent | Medium | Medium | Low | Medium |
Timedifferent | 1-3 h | 1-3 Wochen | 30-90 min | 30-90 min |
Participantsdifferent | 3-8 | 4-12 Beobachtungen | 2-8 | 1-6 |
Formatsame | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Bottleneck Map, Flow Metrics, Improvement Options, Follow-up Measures | Field Notes, Workflow Insights, Pain Points | Constraint List, Hard/Soft Classification, Option Impact Notes, Decision Boundaries | Decision Tree, Option Map, Assumption List |
Tagsno overlap | FlowMeasurementConstraints | UX researchObservationContext | ConstraintsDecisionPlanningOptions | DecisionTreeOptions |