Advanced Business Rule and Decision Analysis

Course Description

Rapidly adapting to change is at the heart of business agility.  Many organizations struggle to keep up with the pace of change because they are unable to quickly alter the way that decisions are made.  Business rules are often highly complex, poorly understood, and inconsistently applied. They may be buried deep down in legacy systems, with the source code sometimes being the only documentation detailing how critical business decisions are made.  Not only does this inhibit business success, but it may also leave the organization exposed to legal, regulatory, and compliance issues.

This course teaches techniques for decomposing business policies, rules, and related information into a reusable library of business logic.  Participants will learn to distinguish between business logic and process flow and will be able to improve and simplify process models by isolating complex business logic.  Several well-defined visual approaches to representing business logic are covered, along with techniques for reviewing models to ensure that the logic is complete, correct, and unambiguous.  Participants will practice using elicitation and facilitation techniques to draw out relevant business logic throughout the course.

Emphasis is placed on developing decision models for more complex logic. The representation techniques taught are consistent with the Object Management Group’s Decision Model and Notation™ standard.

Concepts and principles are reinforced through examples and exercises. The course culminates in a workshop where students develop a business rule model for a case study or their own project.

Learning Objectives 

• Learn about the relationship between business decisions and business rules
• Simplify business process models by creating “decision-aware” process models that separate decision-making from other process flow
• Draw out business logic using relevant elicitation and facilitation techniques
• Analyze and visually represent business rule logic using a variety of visualization approaches:
  • Decision trees
  • Flowcharts
  • Decision tables
  • Decision models
• Understand when and how to use various business rule models
• Decompose and represent complex business decisions using a decision model
• Learn to develop specialized views of decision models to accommodate rule variations
• Validate business rule models to ensure complete, correct, and unambiguous rule representation
• Manage business logic to facilitate re-use

Intended Audience 

This course is designed for business analysts, business stakeholders, business stewards, data stewards, project managers, product owners, product managers, system and enterprise architects involved with elicitation, management, and/or automation of business rules and logic.

Prerequisites 

Students should understand the concepts of workflow modeling.