After the “interruption” by the October Rules Fest and the Business Rules Forum, I am continuing the series on Governance and Management…
This post is part of a series on Business Rules Governance and Management for which the main article can be found here.
Roles and Responsibilities
So now we have some key players from the governance and management teams and we can start the “real” work.
One of the first things that I suggest gets started is a list of Roles and Responsibilities. The reason for this is that with that list in mind it may get the key team members thinking about what tasks will eventually need to get done (Responsibilities) and who would have the responsibility (Role).
The list you will see below is strongly inspired by the “Agile Business Rules Development” (ABRD) Methodology (See References at the end of the post).
I suggest starting with this list, adapt it to your needs and make it fit with how you intend to work and your enterprise.
Also remember that Role does not necessarily equal a position (or a person) in the organization. A single individual may play multiple roles as part of his/her work with business rules. You can identify the people later, although it sometimes helps to match actual people’s names to the role or roles that this person would play.
Role
Role-Responsibilities
Business Owner
Control the execution of a Line Of Business
CIO / CTOExecutive Team
If driving the initiative, account for metrics and high-level KPIs
If not, push for executive buy-in and high-level organizational support
Use high-level support as an opportunity for improvement across silos (COE, Governance)
Project Manager
Manage the project
Policy Manager or Subject Matter Expert (SME)
Support the definition of business processes
Determine and manage the implementation of a business policy, generally by providing the content for the business rules that enforce the policy and the process contexts in which the rules are applied.
Oversee the execution of that policy via business rules applied. Such oversight includes confirming that implemented rules fully and faithfully correspond to the intended policy.
Review rules, rule flow
Review the results of testing and simulation
Manage business vocabulary
Resolve business issues relating to BR
Be accountable for the quality of the BR
Approve major changes to BR
Manager Or Rule Steward
Develop and maintain a comprehensive plan for the rule management group activities
Establish BR policies
Identify business sponsors for issues relating to BR
Develop processes for rule management and standards for rule capture and documentation
Ensure that repository management processes are followed
Ensure that enterprise rule standards are followed
Standard management position
Enterprise IT Architect
Select technologies that are in line with the enterprise architecture
Ensure that the vision for the enterprise architecture is considered
Rule Architect
Select technology to ensure performance and usability
Design, test, implement rules using appropriate technology (triggers, rule engine)
Ensure the overall deployment organization of the rules makes sense from an application segmentation perspective
Ensure rule execution is optimized
Establish traceability for rules within the technical architecture
Ensure rule reuse
Design the structure of the rule repository (defining what metadata customizations are needed and possibly implementing the structure)
Develop the processes developed around repository management
Assist evaluation of implementations with respect to the rules
Coordinate with application developers on system design, implementation and testing
Act as a liaison between business and IT
Rule Analyst
Assist business in identifying existing BR
Research the meaning and origin of BR
Create rule templates for rule authors to use
Analyze rules for completeness, correctness, optimization (from a logical, not performance, perspective)
Identify how rules are used in processes that implement business policies
Ensure the quality of the BR
Ensure consistent terminology is used in the BRs
Analyze BR to identify conflicts, redundancies
Ensure consistency of BR across function, geographies and systems
Conduct impact analysis for revising or replacing BR
Integrate new or revised rules into existing rule set
Make recommendations for BR changes based on business knowledge
Facilitate resolution of BR issues
Act as consultant for the project team
Act as a liaison between business and IT
Vocabulary Analyst
Formalize the business terms (and phrases) used in business rules; this formalization may be in a logical data model, fact model, business object model or some other format that standardizes the terms used and their definitions. ‘Terms’ include nouns, noun phrases and qualified nouns that are referenced in business rules
Create and manage abstract layer of the data model
Process Analyst
Define the overall process context for the business area/ application.
Work with business SMEs to understand the logical business processes and how they fit together in a logical flow (or in an implementation flow for a given application).
Identify where rules are needed in processes
Create and update process flow
Rule Author
Write detailed rules, following appropriate syntax and using standard vocabulary Validate rules in detail against the object model and data model
Perform impact analysis for potential changes to rules from technical perspective
Identify events where rules should fire
Challenge BR for ambiguity, inconsistency and conflict from a technical perspective
Test Rules
Create and update rule flow
Run simulations
Ensure rule reuse
Debug rule logic
Create and manage test cases to test the rule logic
Business Analyst
Understand business goals
Find business solutions to business problems
Ensure business solutions support business goals
Make recommendations for business change based on business knowledge
Conduct impact analysis of proposed business changes
Identify and assess business tactics and associated risks
Facilitate meetings to gather business requirements
Document “as-is” and “to be” workflows
Record terminology, business concepts and fact model
Capture and express business rules
Analyze BR, identifying conflicts, redundancies
Decompose BR to atomic level
Act as business team lead for the project team
Act as a liaison between business and IT
Understand business rules methodology and how to apply it
Developer
Develop application business logic, database access layer, GUI
Domain object model
Meet functional specs
Write technical rules in low level ILOG Rules Language
Set rule project foundations:
Rule project structure
rule set parameters
rule flow
sandbox testing in Rule Studio
Develop the BOM to XOM mapping
May have rule management requirements if rules are primarily technical rather than business-managed
UAT Tester
Business tester
Performs final testing of the application by performing relevant business scenarios to determine if the system tested will satisfy the real world business needs
Sign off of the rules implementation
QA engineer
Manage application and rule set quality
Develop Rule Test cases
Define Key Performance Indicator with the Policy manager
Rule Repository Administrator
Manage the different rule repository cross departments
Develop the standards that are required across projects
Manage the rule deployment and rule set quality
Install and configure environment
Deploy the application
Re-deploy rulesets as changes are made
User management (security)
IT Operations
Monitoring Business Rules Execution
Reporting statistical use of business rules
Making sure everything is running smoothly
To put things in a more “Visual” Perspective, I also have created a graph shown below that depicts the roles mentioned above, but classified along 2 dimensions: production-management and business-technical.
The Production-Management dimension simply shows how close to management or to actual operations and production the roles are.
The Business-Technical dimension shows how technical the role is expected to be or how pure business the role is.
Once again, these are subject to interpretation (even I can’t seem to agree with myself on the exact position for each role) but it serves as a visual indicator of what kind of person should be filling-in the role in question.
Adding Skills
Once we have to Roles and Responsibilities well identified, a list of skills can be developed for each role. This list of skills can range from the technical skills required for the product to the management skills that are required by a specific role.
This list of skills can then eventually be used to build a training plan so that when specific people are associated to the roles, there is also a starting point for building a training plan to make sure the person has all the skills required to fulfill his or her role.
The table available in ABRD actually supplies a list of skills for the roles and can be used as a starting point for filling in your own list of skills.
Next, we will be looking at some of the Management pieces we need to focus on. We will start with the Rule Life Cycle.
Business Rules Forum 2008 presentation, Benefits of a Business Rule Management Tool/Repository and Not a Requirements Management Tool, by Shikha Khan, Single Family CMO Rules Management, October 29, 2008
