Business Rule Solutions - The Business Rule Technique Company

Harvesting Business Rules:
From Source Materials to Business Rules (3 days)

About This Seminar

This seminar contains the distilled knowledge from a decade of intensive BRS experience in using the Business Rules Approach to harvest rules from a wide variety of industries, including insurance, banking, regulatory, inspections, utilities, and transportation. It demystifies the daunting task of facing unending pages of text, and wondering how to go about getting out all the rules.

In this seminar, you will dive deep into analyzing source documents, harvesting rules, and organizing the results following an eight step plan. The class’s workshop case study features typical source material. You will be shown how to layout a plan of attack, extract the information you need, identify issues, harvest the rules, write rule statements in a consistent manner, validate the rules with business people, and manage the results. Dress comfortably and be ready to work!

You Will Learn How To

  • Select the right kind(s) of source material.
  • Identify the right people to participate, and when and how.
  • Bring business expertise to the table and validate your interpretations.
  • Establish the right perspective and scope for analyzing the rules.
  • Apply rule harvesting techniques.
  • Develop appropriate visualizations, including dependency diagrams and decision tables.
  • Interpret and reduce source material into well-formed business rules.
  • Organize the work effort -- when to work together and how to work apart.
  • Coordinate your rule management set-up.

What Makes This Seminar Unique

  • Taught by the industry leaders and pioneers in the field, with 30+ collective years of direct research and practice with business rules techniques.
  • Illustrated through-out with a far-ranging set of real life experiences.
  • Refined techniques carefully crafted for time-conserving, high-impact business participation.
  • Structured for maximum traction -- harvest 30 - 50 business rules within 3 days.

Seminar Outline

    DAY 1

    What Business Rules Are About

    • Rules for control and guidance
    • Scalability and vocabulary
    • Fact models

    Product/Service Rules

    • How are they different?
    • Decision points
    • Establishing scope

    Rule Reduction

    • Basic principles
    • Rules vs. facts
    • Policy and governance vs. actionable rules
    • Steps in rule analysis

    Tips and Tricks

    Drill-Down 1: What You Need to Know

    • Goals
    • Specify once, re-use everywhere
    • Audit rules
    • Identifying business issues
    • Divide and conquer

    Class Exercises

    Tips and Tricks

    RuleSpeak® - Expressing Business Rules

    • What to avoid and why
    • Eliminating ambiguity
    • Guidelines
    • Rule expression and re-usability

    Class Exercises

    DAY 2

    Fact Modeling: The Basic Vocabulary

    • Structured terminology
    • Visualization
    • Guidelines for definitions
    • Categorizations
    • Developing facts -- case studies

    Class Exercises

    Tips and Tricks

    Fact Modeling: More Vocabulary

    • Roles
    • Objectifications
    • Compositions
    • Instances
    • Unary, binary and n-ary fact types

    Class Exercises

    Fact Modeling: Vocabulary and Rules

    • Using rules for current business practices
    • Generalizing facts
    • Facts from rules

    Class Exercises

    Tips and Tricks

    Decision Tables

    • Using decision tables
    • Handling dimensions
    • ompleteness, subsumations and conflicts

    Class Exercises

    Drill-Down 2: The Initial Phases

    • Major decision point(s)
    • Decision hierarchies
    • Circumstances and consequences
    • Organizing complex decisions

    Class Exercises

    Tips & Tricks

    DAY 3

    Drill-Down 3: The Iterative Phases

    • Happy circumstances
    • Following the threads
    • Coordinating terms
    • Addressing exceptions
    • Reassessment and repetition

    Class Exercises

    Organizing the Work

    • Roles and responsibilities
    • Tools
    • Hand-offs

    Tips & Tricks

    Challenging Your Rules

    • Validation and verification
    • Forms of redundancy
    • Equivalences, subsumations and conflicts
    • Quality points

    Class Exercises

    Managing Product/Service Rules

    • Organizing your rule space
    • Property-by-property -- what to manage
    • Governance for product/service knowledge

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