Business Rules and Decision Analysis: Hands-On Workshop (2-Days)
by Ronald G. Ross and Gladys S.W. Lam
"The skills and techniques every analyst needs to know to develop business rules and decision logic effectively, taught by the foremost world authorities in the field."
About This Seminar ...
You'll walk away from this rapid-paced, hands-on workshop ready to develop easy-to-understand business rules for your company in the form of decision tables, unambiguous sentences, or some combination of both, whatever is best-suited for the purpose. You will gain an immediate boost in productivity through sharper analysis and communication skills, both for the business side and the IT side. Here's how you can take business analysis to the next level of capability.
This seminar demystifies business rules and prepares you to capture them in a wide variety of circumstances. It reviews many dozens of real-world examples and templates, many of which you can adapt to your own work. You'll be prepared with pragmatic techniques to capture and formulate business rules separately from business process models and other kinds of requirements. Everything presented is reinforced via hands-on workshop problems.
New to this seminar is the very latest on decision analysis. Proven techniques are presented to identify and analyze decisions in the day-to-day operations of the business and to capture and organize the related business rules in optimal fashion using decision tables. Your intuitive understanding of decision tables will be fined-tuned and made ready for rigorous, effective and smart application.
This workshop also demonstrates how to develop smart Q&A dialogs as part of system requirements. Based on business rules and decision tables, these structured dialogs guide users in directed fashion to provide the exact information needed to make each decision correctly. In addition, since the underlying decision logic is highly organized and accessible, the dialogs can be refined rapidly as new insights are gained during actual business operation. This round-trip, business-driven approach not only produces dramatic improvements in system design practices, but also results in a highly dynamic, highly agile work environment. Now the business can learn from its own experience and continuously make itself smarter.
Special Note to Past Attendees: If you have taken our business rules seminar previously, you can arrange to attend just the Wednesday session on Decision Analysis by special request.
What Makes This Seminar Unique ...
Special Offer
Exclusive One-on-One Review ... when you register two or more people from your company, bring samples of your work. Schedule time with the instructors after class or at lunch for feedback and discussion of your in-house project.
Business Focus. Rather than platform- or system-driven, the techniques taught in this seminar are about capturing business rules in business terms, working directly with business partners and SMEs.
Decisions and Decision Tables. Decision tables have been around longer than even software engineering. Yet many professionals have never focused directly on how to apply them successfully to business problems. This seminar offers you must-know skills in this area in combination with breakthrough insights about analyzing operational business decisions.
Solid Grounding. The seminar contains the distilled knowledge from over a decade of intensive experience in harvesting rules from a wide variety of industries, including insurance, banking, regulatory, inspections, utilities, transportation, and more. It is taught by the industry leaders and pioneers in the field, with 35+ collective years of direct research and practice with business rules techniques. In addition, the techniques presented in this seminar are 100% compliant with OMG's standard for business vocabulary and business rules, SBVR.
Learning Objectives ...
- Conduct smarter, more effective business analysis
- Identify and analyze decisions in business processes
- Organize effective projects to harvest business rules
- Write clear, business-friendly rule statements
- Create robust decision tables
- Know what technique to use, and when
- Validate decision logic with business people
- Identify anomalies in decision logic and correct them early
- Perform concept analysis and develop a structured business vocabulary
- Develop appropriate visualizations, including fact models, decision structures, and dependency diagrams
- Develop smart Q&A dialogs as part of system design
- Establish comprehensive traceability for your business rules
- Develop a pragmatic rule management approach
Course Certification ...
AttainingEdge is an Endorsed Education Provider™ (EEP) of IIBA®
The Business Rules and Decision Analysis: Hands-On Workshop has been approved to be earn 16 CDU and PD hours.
Seminar & Workshop Outline ...
Day 1
- Why business rules
- What business rules are, and are not
- How decision analysis fits in
- What skills you need to capture business rules effectively
- Business rules vs. business processes
- What every business analyst needs to know
- What terms really mean and how you figure it out
- Guidelines for definitions
- Do's and don'ts
- What every Business Analyst should know
- Visualization
- Developing facts - creating a verbal blueprint for know-how
- Using business rules for current business practices
- What to avoid
- Facts from rules
- Basic principles for rule analysis
- Rules vs. facts
- Policy and governance to deployable rules
- Traceability for the business - not just IT
- What to avoid and why
- Business policies vs. practicable rules vs. automated rules
- Eliminating ambiguity
- Guidelines
- Addressing exceptions
- Validation and verification
- Forms of redundancy
- Equivalences, subsumptions, conflicts and other anomalies
- Rule quality
What Business Rules and Decision Analysis Are About
Concept Analysis
Workshop
Fact Models: Developing a Structured Business Vocabulary
Class Excercises
Tips and Tricks
Rule Reduction
Tips and Tricks
Expressing Your Business Rules
Class Exercises
Challenging Your Rules
Class Exercises
Tips and Tricks
Day 2
- Behavioral rules vs. business decision rules
- Understanding your problem space
- The techniques you need to know
- What decision analysis is
- The elements of decisions
- Identifying cases and criteria
- Identifying outcomes
- What's the question
- How to establish scope
- How to refine scope
- How to handle exceptions
- How to keep the decision logic as simple as possible
- Slim decision logic
- Independent sub-decisions
- Diagramming decision structures
- Decision dependencies
- Shaping and refining the question
- How business motivation shapes the question and outcomes
- Metrics
- Boxing the decision
- How to set up the table
- Revisiting business processes
- How you can test if the decision logic is complete
- How facts and the fact model fit in
- Defaults
- Restrictions on criteria and outcomes
- Missing criteria
- How do you wrap it up
- Best practices
- Alternative formats
- When you should use the traditional format
- Completeness, subsumption and conflicts
- Dangers of the traditional format
- General rules and single point of change
- Pre-emption and dependencies
What Decisions and Decision Logic are About
Decision Analysis
Workshop
The Structure of Decisions
Class Exercises
Tips and Tricks
Decision Tables: The Basics
Workshop
Decision Tables: Sharpening Your Analysis Skills
Tips and Tricks
Class Exercises
Seminar Pricing ...
$1,195 / person
Team Discounts:
- 1-3 people: Regular price
- 4-7 people: 1 Free Registration - Save $1,195!
- 8-11 people: 2 Free Registrations - Save $2,390!
Combination Offer:
- Save $435 (per person) when you register for our Business Analysis with Business Rules: Workshop on Business Requirements & Modeling seminar in the same week.
Seminar Highlights
- About This Seminar
- What Makes This Seminar Unique
- Learning Objectives
- Seminar Outline
- Meet Your Instructors
- Seminar Pricing
- In-House Training
- Learning By Doing
Register Now!
$ 1,195 / person
Special team & combo rates available
March 6-7, 2012
BONUS OFFER: Register before
January 31 and save 10%
San Francisco, CA
Marriott Marquis
55 4th Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Discount room rates from $249/night
Click to register now
April 23-24, 2012
BONUS OFFER: Register before
March 3 and save 10%
Toronto, ON
Metro Toronto Convention Center
255 Front Street West
Toronto, ON M5V 2X7
Canada
Discount room rates from $209/night at Intercontinental Toronto
Click to register now
Instructors
Ronald G. Ross
Ronald G. Ross serves as Executive Editor of BRCommunity and its flagship publication, Business Rules Journal. He is a sought-after speaker at conferences world-wide. He gives popular public seminars through AttainingEdge (www.AttainingEdge.com) and in Europe though IRM-UK (www.IRMUK.co.uk).
Mr. Ross is recognized internationally as the "father of business rules." He has served as Co-Chair of the annual Business Rules Forum Conference since 1997. He was a charter member of the Business Rules Group (BRG) in the 1980s, and an editor of the two landmark BRG papers, "The Business Motivation Model: Business Governance in a Volatile World" and the "Business Rules Manifesto." He is active in OMG standards development, with core involvement in SBVR.
Mr. Ross is Principal and Co-Founder of Business Rule Solutions, LLC. At BRS, Mr. Ross co-develops Proteus®, its landmark business analysis and rules methodology, including the popular RuleSpeak® (www.RuleSpeak.com). Mr. Ross is the author of nine professional books. His newest are: Building Business Solutions: Business Analysis with Business Rules with Gladys S.W. Lam (2011, An IIBA® Sponsored Handbook) and Business Rule Concepts (2009), a 3rd edition of his ever-popular, easy-to-read 1998 handbook.
Gladys S.W. Lam
Gladys S.W. Lam is a world-renowned authority on applied business rule techniques. She is Principal and Co-Founder of Business Rule Solutions, LLC (www.BRSolutions.com), the most recognized company world-wide in business rules and decision analysis. Business Rule Solutions provides methodology, publications, consulting services, and training. Ms. Lam is co-creator of Proteus®, the BRS methodology. She is Co-Founder of BRCommunity.com, a vertical community for professionals and home of Business Rules Journal. She co-authored Building Business Solutions: Business Analysis with Business Rules, with Ronald G. Ross, an IIBA® sponsored handbook on business analysis with business rules.
Ms. Lam is widely known for her lively, pragmatic style. She speaks internationally at conferences and other professional events. She co-presents public seminars through AttainingEdge (www.AttainingEdge.com). She is also Executive Director of the Building Business Capability (BBC) Conference, which includes the Business Rules Forum and the Business Analysis Forum, the official conference of the IIBA®.
In-House Training
Bring this world-class seminar to your site!
- Cost Effective
- Top Quality Instructors
- Convenient
- Customized
Learning By Doing
Exploring business rules through "live" project work
Bring us to your company for live demonstrations on your project work
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