Pitfalls and Lessons Learned of Business Rules Implementation - A Business Analyst Perspective Perspective

Senior Artemis Alliance staff, drawing on their practical experience with what can go wrong from management, technical, and business analysis perspectives, provided insight into how and why business rules initiatives fail and strategies to assure the success of such initiatives.

by Alyce Neperud, Artemis Principal and Senior Business Analyst

Significant analysis pitfalls include:

• Resistance to change
• Separation of rules from requirements
• Poor repository planning
• Selecting the wrong people to be rules analysts
• Solving the same problem in different ways
• No champion

Success Strategies
To overcome resistance to change:

• Educate to provide better understanding of why the organization is doing it this way.
• Build support within all areas.
• Development
• Analysis
• Testing
• Project Management
• Enable them to “skin their knees”.
• Let the team make mistakes quickly and see the value of the approach.
• Bring understanding of the “big picture” and the value of the approach down-stream in the development process.

To prevent the separation of rules from requirements:

• Teach them to write good requirements and good rules.
• Avoid having one group writing requirements and another writing rules.
• Use concrete examples.
• Show the new version of artifacts after introducing the concrete examples.
• Tell the entire story in an integrated manner.
• Use short, fast iterations with experienced review to provide experience and feedback

To encourage good repository planning:

• Do not take a document centric approach--focus on writing good rules rather than on where they fit in the document.
• Use knowledgeable people in designing the rules repository.
• Work through the versioning and change management in detail.
• Execute full rule lifecycle testing of the repository.

To select the right rules analysts:

• Do not assume that every subject matter expert will be a good analyst.
• Do not assign critical tasks to people who are unproven.
• Have internal or external mentors who have time to help
• Pair experienced people with inexperienced.
• Explicitly determine skill levels of team members.

To avoid different solutions to the same problem:

• Establish model for sharing information and lessons learned.
• Consistency is essential to precision.
• Do not let separate groups make their own decisions.
• Have some experts looking across the entire set.
• Do not overwork your experts.
• Be careful in how you tasks are assigned to avoid overlapping work.

Alyce’s advice for the ‘no champion’ problem ia simple: Get one! No champion equates to a greatly reduced probability of success.