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 ...
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
Seminar & Workshop Outline ...
Day 1.
What Business Rules and Decision Analysis Are About
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
Rule Reduction
Basic principles for rule analysis Rules vs. facts Policy and governance to deployable rules Traceability for the business - not just IT
Tips and Tricks
Expressing Your Business Rules
Class Exercises
Concept Analysis
What do terms really mean How you figure it out Why it really does matter Guidelines for definitions Do's and don'ts What every business analyst should know
Workshop
Fact Models: Developing a Structured Business Vocabulary
Guidelines for definitions Visualization Developing facts - case studies Using rules for current business practices What to avoid Facts from rules
Class Exercises
Tips and Tricks
Challenging Your Rules
Validation and verification Forms of redundancy Equivalences, subsumptions, conflicts and other anomalies Rule quality
Class Exercises
Tips and Tricks
Day 2.
What Decisions and Decision Logic are About
Business process rules vs. business know-how rules Understanding your problem space The techniques you need to know
Decision Analysis
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
Workshop
The Structure of Decisions
Independent sub-decisions Diagramming decision structures Decision dependencies Shaping and refining the question How business motivation shapes the question and outcomes Metrics
Class Exercises
Tips and Tricks
Decision Tables: The Basics
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
Workshop
Decision Tables: Advanced Analysis Skills
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
Tips and Tricks
Class Exercises
The Next Steps
Tips and Tricks
Rule Management
Rule Management Demo
About Your Instructors
This seminar is jointly taught by Ronald G. Ross and Gladys S.W. Lam.
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RONALD G. ROSS
Ronald G. Ross is a Principal of Business Rule Solutions, LLC (www.BRSolutions.com). Mr. Ross is also
Co-Founder and Executive Editor of www.BRCommunity.com, home of the Business Rules Journal. Mr. Ross
is the author of a half-dozen professional books. His newest works on business rules are
Business Rule Concepts (3rd Ed., 2009) and Principles of the Business Rule Approach
(Addison-Wesley, 2003). He is Chair of the annual Business Rules Forum Conference. He was a
charter member of the Business Rules Group in the 1980's and editor of its two landmark papers,
"Business Motivation Model" and the Business Rules Manifesto. He is also active in the OMG Business
Rules standards development. Mr. Ross is internationally recognized as the "father of business rules."
For additional information about Mr. Ross, please visit his personal website at www.RonRoss.info.
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GLADYS S.W. LAM
Gladys S.W. Lam is a Principal of Business Rule Solutions, LLC
(www.BRSolutions.com). She is also a Co-Founder of www.BRCommunity.com, home of the Business Rules
Journal. Ms. Lam is a world-renowned authority on applied business
rule techniques. She is an experienced and widely acclaimed management
consultant and expert facilitator. Ms. Lam is the Co-Creator of Proteus®, the
BRS Business Rule Methodology. Ms. Lam is also the Executive Director of the
Business Rules Forum Conference, the premier international conference on business rules.
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Registration Information:
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