If we were trying to replace a process that had been done by hand, and produced official records.

They asked me to automate this process, but I found that in some cases they just hadn't really kept track of their own thinking on a subject.

So, imagine one part of the document that says 'If A, B and C add up to 20, the status is Y'. Then, another part of the document saying 'If A,B and C is less than 22, the status is N'. That's an oversimplification, but you get the idea.

They give me things all the time where they think they have a simple, logical, process but where they have conflicting rules about the output.

So, part of my job is laying these issues out. They're usually the result of translating what looks like legal documents, and the conflicting logic is usually separated by a page or two.

The leadership makes a decision, and writes something impenetrable and usually flawed, then the process manager tries to make that into a logical process, then I get asked to automate it, and they often just realize they've been doing it half one way, and half the other way, for a year ... or they realize they've always done one or the other, and we just make the decision to pretend the conflicting bit doesn't exist.

business rules are made by people, usually committee, and they forget what they were doing from one page to the next.