Task: Define the Business |
Identify the boundaries of the business and describe interactions in terms of business actors and business use cases.
Disciplines: Business Modeling
Purpose
To define the boundaries of the business to be modeled. To define who and what will interact with the business. To outline the processes in the business. To capture business requirements.
Relationships
Roles | Primary Performer: Business Analyst | Additional Performers: Stakeholder
Inputs | Mandatory: Business Vision | Optional: Business Use-case Model [Business Requirements] Business Goal Business Use Case Business Use-case Model
Outputs | Business Use Case Business Use-case Model
Main Description
Define the boundary and interactions of the business by utilizing use cases to describe a "black box" view of the business. Understand the organization at a high-level so that the initial scope of business definition or refactoring can be determined. Further analysis will be performed to detail these descriptions. Portions of this task are from the Eclipse Process Framework 1.5, made available under the Eclipse Public License V1.0.
Steps
Gather information
Use various techniques to make identifying business requirements easier. See Guideline: Requirements Gathering Techniques for ideas on how to gather requirements. Face-to-face meetings with stakeholders is the most effective way to understand stakeholder needs and to gather and validate requirements, but you must prepare in order for these meetings to run efficiently. Be prepared by gathering and reviewing information related to the problem and business domains, business environment, and key stakeholders. Most of this information is available in the business vision. Also review any existing stakeholder requests.
Identify the types of requirements relevant to your business
Requirements can be broadly classified as either functional or non-functional requirements. The former specify what the business must do. The latter specify constraints on the business such as customer satisfaction, response time, interfaces with other organizations, etc. Depending upon the domain there can be regulatory requirements that also apply. Collaborate with stakeholders to identify the types of requirements relevant to your business. This will help you assess the completeness of your requirement set.
Identify and capture business use cases and business actors in the business use-case model
Define the line that divides the business and the business's environment. Collaborate with the stakeholders, since decisions concerning system boundaries will have a major impact on cost, schedule and system architecture. Record actors and use cases in the use case model. Collaborate with stakeholders to identify business interfaces, as well as input and output information exchanged with business users or other organizations. Identify and capture the actors and use cases in the use-case model. Use the use case work product to outline the use cases. See Identify and Outline Business Actors and Use Cases for more information.
Consider business goals
Review any business goals that have already been described, and consider whether they will be supported by business use cases. If a business use case supports very different business goals you will find it difficult to measure or improve its performance. Consider splitting such a use case into multiple use cases. Business use cases that support none of the already-identified business goals could be unnecessary. On the other hand, further investigation of these business use cases could reveal undiscovered business goals. Business goals must also be considered in comparison to the business actors. Do the identified business goals drive the business toward the business actors that they intend to embrace? Are any business actors not addressed by the business goals? New business goals also might be discovered during this analysis. See Concept: Business Goal for more information.
Consider the business constraints and environment
Indicate the major elements of the business must address and its environment such as external influences, regulatory bodies, partners. Add this information as constraints and requirements in the Supplementary Business Specification. See Requirements Gathering Techniques for details on identifying requirements and constraints.
Define the human resources
The process of defining the human resource aspects of the business. The human resources aspects refine the Business Worker. and includes: Consider the competence profiles that exist within the organization. Define competence profiles that will be required in the future, or define the necessary changes to the existing profiles. Will the future business require employees to be more or less independent? Will they need higher or lower education requirements? Discuss education needs. Define both long-term training programs to overcome the differences between current and desired competence profiles, as well as any initial training needs associated with the introduction of new business processes. Define any mechanisms (reward structures, trainee programs, mentor programs, or other incentives) that exist or need to be put in place to enhance skill levels. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each. Explore the possibility of relocating individuals in the organization due to changes in responsibilities or the need to enhance communication.
Prioritize business use cases
Prioritize business use cases that are of high interest. Critical, risky, or unclear use cases must be described in detail. You could find you want to detail all use cases, many use cases, or parts of a few critical use cases. To determine high-priority business use cases: Determine the business use cases that will be of interest to the intended system if you perform business engineering to find the requirements of information systems. Develop a clear outline of use cases before deciding whether or not to include any that are not clearly relevant from an information-system perspective. Look for the business use cases that support the most important business goals.
Evaluate the results
Check the use-case model to verify that the model is correct and consistent. It's not necessary to\ review the model in detail. Consider the Checklist: Business Use-Case while working on the model. The interested parties must determine if: All necessary use cases are identified. Any unnecessary use cases have been removed from the model. Each business use case's outline is as complete as possible at this stage.
Achieve Concurrence
Conduct a review of the use cases and business requirements with relevant stakeholders to ensure consistency with the agreed vision, goals, and to identify any required changes.
Key Considerations
Creating business use cases is very similar to creating system use cases. If you've never created business use cases, you can leverage the skills of an analyst who has written use cases for software systems to help define the use case model.
More Information
Checklists | Business Use-Case
Concepts | Business Use Case Communicate Association Functional Decomposition
Guidelines | Requirements Gathering Techniques
Whitepapers | Effective Business Modeling with UML: Describing Business Use Cases and Realizations
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