At A Glance

Rules are the most pervasive operational component of virtually every organization in the world, whether for profit or not, whether mom-and-pop or global player. And while every organization uses business rules to operate, many don't take proactive steps to formalize, maintain, optimize and execute rules using robust analysis and execution environments.

This training course is designed to help organizations strengthen their business rules management capabilities. Using facilitated workshops and mentoring activities this course aims to immerse your team in the identification, modeling and execute of business rules through the project lifecycle. The workshops and activities focus on five business rules disciplines and four areas of organizational maturity for successful business rules management.

Introduction to Business Rules Analysis

Rules Analysis is the all-encompassing, "front end" activity of identifying, specifying, refactoring and modeling the business rules you use to run your organization. Your project team will participate in a one-day workshop that introduces six key concepts:

How to set up your business rules analysis environment
Harvesting existing and identifying new business rules
Refactoring business requirements into rules
Integration of rules with other project artifacts, such as business/system requirements and use-cases
Organizing rules into inference networks and distinguishing between inference rules and procedural rules
Visually modeling of rules for better understanding among business users and IT staff.

Rules Modeling

Facilitated learning and mentoring workshops that enable your team to visually model business rule inference networks. Your team will learn the importance of modeling rules as part of the organixzations business rules initiative. They will discover how to:

Use different inference network elements, such as infernce rule, inferred fact, and action assertion rule, including how each relates to the other
Understand what a Business Object Model is and how rules use it
Illustrate rules
Determine dependencies
Determine rule expressions
Perform basic rules refactoring
Trace rules to business requirements and use-cases.

Rules Execution Strategies

It's equally important for an organization serious about implementing a business rules initiative to understand how it fits into the overall IT infrastructure, specifically, how business rules are "run." Day-in and day-out. This activity begins with a half-day workshop that reviews how various rules engines can be deployed. The activity continues with more formal analysis of rule engines, a survey and evaluation of commercially available rules solutions, and how to define architectural framework that will use a rules engine.

Integrating Rules into Your Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)

Because rules are so central to the development and maintenance of your software applications, the analysis and deployment of rules must be integrated into your larger software development lifecycle. This one-day workshop engages your IT team in defining a business rules methodology. They learn to identify the various business rules intervention points in your SDLC and how the integration of responsibilities between the business rules analysts and software designers/developers is critical. This is a valuable workshop even if you haven't formalized an SDLC process.

Rules Practice in the Business Community

This one-day workshop exposes your team to how the other guy is doing rules. Two case studies will be presented that show how two Enterprise Agility clients have defined and managed their business rules initiatives. Using various techniques and knowledge gained in previous workshop activities, the workshop concludes with an exercise to determine key building blocks of your business rules initiative, including visioning; rule team planning, and identification and personalization of best practices.

Who on Your Team Will Benefit?

Together, the five disciplines that make up the Business Rules Manament Training Program will appeal to a wide audience. The audience for business rules can be fairly divided into two camps: (1) business users, those subject matter, or domain, experts who define and help maintain the rules that run the business; and (2) IT team members who will help deploy the rules execution environment.

Business users usually include: product manager; service manager; marketing manager-virtualy anyone whose domain contains rules that might be included in your business rules initiative. The IT team would include: the business analysts who will be working with the domain experts; the person or team that will be managing the rules engine; and any members of project teams that must integrate your applications with the rules engine.

Who Will Deliver Your Training Program?

Enterprise Agility fields two solution architects for the Business Rules Management Training Program: a senior business rules consultant who will focus on the analysis and planning portion of the Program; and a senior technical architect who will shepard your IT team through the planning and deployment activities of the rules engine and its integration requirements. Both members of the Enterprise Agility team have an average of seventeen years experience in the IT industry and have a proven track record planning and implementing business rules systems.