All areas of organised human activities have rules: societal laws govern how we live, parents set rules for their children, and even games we play follow a rule book. According to Business Rules expert, Ron Ross, rules should govern business, and also be the prerequisites and the structure governing solutions business analysts (BA) create for their companies.
Business Rules are the criteria used to make operational business decisions and judgments. Ross, who will be in South Africa to host two Business Rules workshops this August, says in most businesses, "rules are everywhere in general and nowhere in particular". According to Ross, when business rules are embedded in legacy code, in the heads of experts, in documentation or in use cases, they become hard to find, hard to analyse and difficult to change. This becomes a major impediment to both daily productivity as well as greater business agility
Ross is a regular conference speaker at the annual Business Rules Forum Conferencefor the past 12 years. The forum provides the platform for professionals to recount how business rules and related technologies work in their own organisations. "It is a proven fact that business rules are effective, often achieving an order-of-magnitude improvement or more," says Ross. While business rules are no sliver bullet, the key to success with business rules is for BAs to make them a major priority of the requirements approach.
Ross explains: "If you are modelling business processes, you externalise and unify the business rules. That is a win-win - the process becomes smarter, and the business decisions more agile. If you are doing use cases, recognise that the business rules need to be tackled directly, and then co-ordinated across the use cases. If you are doing agile, you should identify and validate the rules separately. Doing the rules in parallel is an important means to speed up software development.
"In all these cases, the thing to realise is that the business rules live on, beyond the point of software deployment. Software release is really just day one in the life cycle of business rules. A great many rules are subject to continuing change - that's not going to stop upon or between software releases. So the architecture of your business solutions needs to feature rule management as a new focal point of co-ordination," says Ross.
Ross is recognised internationally as the "father of Business Rules" and is Co-Founder and Principal of globally recognised Business Rules Solutions, headquartered in Houston, USA. He will be visiting South Africa as a guest of Faculty Training Institute and is also a guest speaker at Business Analysis Summit Southern Africa (BASSA2013). The workshops, being held in Johannesburg this August, are a first-of-a-kind for South Africa and participants will learn state-of-the-art Business Rules skills and techniques.
The Business Analysis with Business Rules: From Strategy to Requirements workshop details the innovative techniques needed for a business-driven approach, and how to apply each technique for dramatic improvements in the quality of business requirements. Delegates will learn how to conduct successful business analysis with business rules, how to write business rules and how to model decisions while receiving immediate feedback. Participants will learn new techniques to discover missing requirements that do not come naturally from process models or use cases or anywhere else. Participants will create great business solutions, not just system designs.
The second workshop, Business Rule & Decision Analysis: Practitioner Masterclass supplies proven, pragmatic solutions and techniques to fix these problems. It provides the steps you need to take before implementing business rules on a project or system.
Both two-day, interactive workshops featuring hands-on exercises would strongly benefit business analysts responsible for engineering business solutions, business people and subject matter experts (SMEs) wanting to express and analyse requirements in a truly business-oriented manner, business process designers responsible for re-engineering and quality improvements, IT professionals, business rules analysts, project leaders, consultants and requirements specialists.
For further information about Business Analysis with Business Rules: From Strategy to Requirements, commencing from 27-28 August and Business Rule & Decision Analysis: Practitioner Master Class from 29-30 August in Johannesburg, please visit www.fti.co.za or contact Lauren on 011 807 9478 or e-mail Lauren@fti.co.za to book your seat.
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