Case in point. I arrived at the car rental counter and requested my vehicle. After providing them my confirmation number since they could not find it in their system, they went through the process of updating my phone numbers and email addresses. Well, this all went fine until they requested a home phone number. I stated my mobile phone IS my home phone, to which the counter clerk said they needed another phone number to complete the reservation, another family member, my mom or dad’s phone number (keep in mind I’m 45, so it’s not like I go around giving out my mom and dad’s phone number anyway, nor do I live with them).

So, under full-disclosure, I am a business analysis, so I questioned why they needed a second phone number if I do all my business with one phone number. Their response was just that they needed it in order to be able to release a car. Here’s where the attack happened. It was so quiet and happened so suddenly that a non-BA may have missed it. The BA in me kicked in and I asked, “When has this policy changed?” and a second counter–agent replied, “that has ALWAYS been our policy.” My response, “I have rented from you for years, and I have never had to supply a second phone number.” The second agent’s reply, “Not at ***** you haven’t.” So I walked away, knowing I have done just that for years and thousands of dollars worth of business. The counter clerks were stunned as I walked away to a competitor’s rental counter. “Over a phone number?” was their question. But it wasn’t a phone number. It was an inconsistently applied business policy.

A call to customer service later, and I find out there IS NO POLICY at this car rental agency that states two phone numbers MUST be on file to release the car. So, I had uncovered a business rule operating differently in two different business domains. On the internet and the 1-800 line, one can reserve and check out a car with only one phone number. At this particular airport, the counter agents can not reserve or check out a car without two phone numbers on file, even for a loyal customer who has given them all his rental car business over the  years. It may have been a local policy in Des Moines, Iowa, but it conflicted with the national policy and 1-800 customer support agent.

Final point is this – know your stakeholders when you are assigned a project. Just because one group says they follow a particular policy doesn’t mean all groups follow that policy. With every touchpoint you have with the customer and the process, understand how the business rules are being applied. You may find them being applied slightly differently in the best of times, and completely opposite in the worst of times. The end result is based on the way they are applied, you may lose a valuable customer. That’s the attack of the conflicting business rule.

Can you think of any situations in which you have encountered conflicting business rules, and they have caused you to discontinue doing business with a company? Worse yet, were they in your own business and you lost customers and did not even realize it was due to the organizations’ handling of the situation?

What conflicting business rules have you uncovered as part of your projects that could have caused a major problem if they were implemented without careful analysis?

A few years ago I went through a merger of a number of cellular phone providers with over 14 different billing systems. One of the inspired things this company did (since it would take a couple of years to convert all the many different systems into one) was to say whenever a customer calls about a problem with billing let’s resolve it exactly the way the customer wants and in a single call. We need to make that promise public and be consistent in carrying it out. It was a genius strategy because customers need attention when there is a problem.  They want someone to listen and provide a speedy and fair resolution. I remember wondering how much revenue would be lost during this multi-year timeframe while billing conversions were being planned and executed and while customer service would not be able to diagnose the true billing problems. Instead of a huge money loss, what happened is that people loved the customer service and would compare it to the other providers whose service was poor.  Customers were paying more for cellular features and staying loyal because of the fabulous customer service they were receiving.   This cellular provider flourished during this time and grew to be the number 1 provider even with the parallel internal chaos that was happening as the company was trying to work through all the merger challenges. The company leaders made a brilliant move to insulate customers as much as possible during that tough transition and to remain consistent across the newly merged companies in their customer service promise. So what does this mean to you in your role as a business analyst? BAs are an essential part of change movements. Change is hard and comes with many issues. You can be proactive and be part the solution rather than an unwilling participant in a looming disaster. A BA with a service-oriented philosophy can bring known risks, requirements gaps and bad requirements to the appropriate person, like your PM to protect your internal or external customers from future chaos and negative repercussions.  There is much you can influence and prevent as part of your job. You may be surprised about what other benefits can happen.

What have you done today to prevent problems or create winning situations for your stakeholders? Solution stories are welcomed here any time….Please share your tips, questions and experiences as part of the winning solution you create everyday where you work.

Sending you all positive energy,

Angie

So what does Airline A say? Since I booked the travel with a partner airline, Airline A is unable to assign the seats on a different airline, even though Airline A sold me the connecting segments on the partner airline as part of my overall travel from ATL (Atlanta) to HNL. Now consider that I’m a BA by nature, so I ask if that’s true, then why does my wife have her seats booked but I don’t – especially since both tickets were purchased on the same transaction? The CSR cannot explain that, and the only answer is that Airline A cannot book seats for Airline B and I will have to get my seat assignment at the gate. She did offer me an alternative, to contact Airline B myself and try to get my seats assigned.

A call to Airline B and another CSR. This CSR cannot find my record because he needs HIS airline’s flight confirmation number, NOT Airline A’s number. Well, of course I don’t have that since Airline A never gave it to me – it’s a field shared internally between the two airlines, but not the customer. Finally, after several minutes of manipulation, he is able to get to my flight via the flight number instead of the confirmation. He also tells me I do have a seat assignment and guess what? Both seats are right next to my wife. Happy? Of course, but why did I have to go through all of the heartache to get that information? The airlines had made a customer go through a lot of trouble because they had failed to perform interface analysis.

When the two airlines had decided on a merger, they needed to understand what data had to pass back and forth. While they had a system working successfully from a booking perspective, they were not working from a customer service/self-service perspective. Here are some things to think about when considering interfaces:

• What processes are going to use the data in the interface? In the case of the airlines, they sucessfully booked a single traveler through multiple flight segments, but forgot about the process to assign seats or change seats. And from the CSR’s response, it appeared they forgot to train the CSRs on what to do if someone calls and requests a seat assignment.
• Who is going to use the data from the interface? Maybe you cannot have a customer change his/her seat assignment in a self-service web mode, but how about a CSR doing it on behalf of the customer? Data that Airline A needed was not available, and in fact, they didn’t even know my seats were assigned. So the interface hampered the ability of Airline A’s CSR to assist me with my situation. On the flipside, when I phoned Airline B about getting my seat assignment, they needed their own confirmation number, but I never received that number in an interface.

Bottom line, as a BA, you have to think through the interface. What processes am I affecting with the interface? Who are my stakeholders (hint – they may actually be an external customer)? Who needs to see the data? Who needs to act on the data? What data is needed in the interface to satisfy the processes? Who gets notified when the data changes or is updated? By understanding this information surrounding an interface, you put your organization in a better position to avoid service failures.

So how about you? Do you have any interface “horror stories” you can share? And what did you learn from it that you took away and reminded yourself never to do?

Let’s decompose this last statement.

1. What is a process?  A process takes inputs and adds value to them via some identified activities to generate outputs.
2. What are business rules?  They are the constraints a business implements in order to be successful.
3. What is a solution? In an IT environment this usually means the solution involves an information system and the users and workflow involved in using the system.
4. What is an information system?  It pulls and pushes Data (the term Information System contains the word information, information is data, hint, hint).  A good information system provides timely, correct data about the business so that the business can make decisions that will drive the business’ success.

What is at the core of all of this?  Data.  Without correct, timely data, a business will not have the ability to make good business decisions.  Period…end of story.

In my experience, a deep, clear knowledge of the information that a business uses and the relationships between that information is the best way to really understand the business.  Processes can and do change, but data is relatively stable.  If you understand the data a business uses to run itself, you can really get a good understanding of that business and actually help the business better understand what it does.

So what can you do as a BA professional to get a good understanding of the data a business uses?  There are several approaches but I typically approach it following the four steps below.

1. In project scoping, I make sure I understand all of the project’s interactions with the ‘outside world’. This means identifying all interfaces we think are going be necessary for the solution to work.  To help me and the project executives understand these interactions, I typically build a context (dataflow) diagram.  This diagram is a great high-level picture of the complexity of the data interactions on a project. It gives me the original sources of the information the solution will need to run effectively as well as the final destination of the data the solution will produce.  These sources and destinations will have representative stakeholders from whom I will need to elicit more details.
2. Also in project scoping, I identify the high level business processes that the project will be affecting or creating.  This gives me a good idea of how many processes will be effected and how complicated they appear to be.  For those processes that seem complex, I break them down into the activities (or low level processes) that make them up so that I have a better idea of how to estimate effort.
3. Having the processes and context diagram from steps 1 and 2, I now have a great picture of the processes and data I’ll need to get more detail on and the stakeholders from whom I need to elicit the details.
4. As I begin analyzing the processes and data flows from steps 1 and 2, I start to build my data model.  I use the time-honored technique of using an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) to see the data entities with their detailed data and relationships. The data relationships are hugely important as they are the data business rules that drive your business.  Asking good questions about the data will bring out business rules that might be missed if you just concentrate on the process workflow.  As more questions are raised and answered, the data model becomes robust and complete.

What is the result?  You end up with a full, deep, clear understanding of the data on which the business runs.  Now the data architect has the information needed to build an efficient, effective database that contains the data and relationships to match the business needs.  The business areas in which you are working end up with a better understanding of what they do.  You move beyond the BA that is just an order-taker and become a valuable, crucial part of the project and the organization as a whole.

I challenge and encourage you to become a business analyst that DOES do data!

To the data,

Ali Ibarguen, B2T Training Sr. Instructor

Under the established procedure in one company I worked at, the meeting schedules were required to go out at the beginning of each project phase. The purpose was so that all stakeholders would be available for the meeting times listed in their calendars, and they could plan their days around the project. However, the process in place when I came onto the project was to have an agenda attached to each meeting invite. Again, a good idea, but one that quickly got out of hand. As discussion topics changed, agendas had to be changed. When that happened, the meeting invites had to go out again so people would get the latest agenda. It quickly overloaded people with meeting change requests. These requests happened not because the actual meeting changed, but because the embedded agenda changed. During that project, I would cringe when I had to send out a changed agenda because I knew I would face upset people standing over my cube wall.

I decided that I would take off my “that’s just the way it is hat” and put on my “BA finds a solution hat.” At the time, my company was rolling out SharePoint in a test mode and was looking for ways to make it improve processes in the organization. Like a kid with a new toy, I dove in and found calendars, lists, action items, workflows, and a whole bunch more. While the calendar function was great and it integrated with Outlook, I had a constraint that Stakeholders were not going to use a group calendar to schedule their days. They wanted the calendar invites on their Outlook calendars. Additionally, they wanted the meeting agenda in their invite so they wouldn’t have to look for it prior to the meeting, and they wanted all the meetings lined up for the next 8 weeks.

So how did I meet all the requests? I scheduled the meeting schedules, and inside every Outlook invite, I included not an attached agenda document, but a hyperlink to a SharePoint list. The Sharepoint list contained the master meeting list and agendas for all the meetings. This allowed me to change the agendas as often as needed to adjust to the flow of the project and never touch the Outlook meeting invites again (unless a meeting actually changed times or dates, which was very infrequent). Prior to the meetings, when stakeholders would access the Outlook invite and click on the link, they would see the latest agenda for the meeting. I even had the SharePoint list only display meeting agendas for meetings that were the current day or in the future, so the link would truly give them what they needed.

What are some techniques that you have used to make life easier on your project teams while still being constrained by a current process?

-Paul

Atlanta/Mendham B2T Training (B2T), a founding member of the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA®) and leader in the field of business analysis training and professional development today announced an agreement with Knowledge Partner International, LLC (KPI), a thought leader in the field of decision management, business rules and business logic, to offer to its client base a new course called Decision Modeling Essentials.

KPI’s managing partners Barbara von Halle and Larry Goldberg are the co-authors of the bestselling book “The Decision Model – A Business Logic Framework Linking Business and Technology” (Taylor & Francis LLC, 2009). The Decision Model describes a new and highly efficient way of eliciting, organizing, managing and testing Business Logic that today is the most successful and fastest growing methodology in the field of decision modeling and business rules.

As a KPI training partner, B2T will work very closely with the originators of The Decision Model to offer its clients a powerful extension of its existing training course portfolio.

“We are very excited about the benefits that our partnership with B2T is providing to both of our companies’ clients” said Barbara von Halle, Managing Partner of KPI, “the B2T team of seasoned trainers, business analysis experts, and BABOK® veterans proves again that they feel the pulse of our industry, know what Business Analysts want, and are hosting training classes offering a competitive edge.”

“Kupe” Kupersmith, President of B2T said “The Decision Modeling Essentials course introduces students to what we believe is the next evolutionary step that comes after conventional Business Rules Management. At B2T we are interested in working with the thought leaders in areas that are relevant for the business analysis professional. Being able to offer a course authored and certified by the originators of The Decision Model is a great addition to our program.”

The first public Decision Modeling Essentials training course is scheduled in Atlanta, Ga on April 10, 2012. Register today!

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Further Information

B2T Training, LLC

“Kupe” Kupersmith, President

Phone: (678) 366-1363

Email:

Knowledge Partners International, LLC

Michael Grohs, VP Business Development

Phone (919) 606-6711

Email:

About B2T Training

Since 2000, B2T Training has focused solely on providing business analysis professional development. The company developed the first comprehensive business analysis training program in North America and has been a model for other training organizations.  As experts in the field, B2T Training continues to shape the Business Analysis discipline and the careers of BA professionals in major corporations across the globe through its high impact training sessions and valuable resources.  B2T Training provides direct access to expert instructors who are also practicing BA professionals, well known and highly respected in the field. Business Analysts looking to increase knowledge, improve performance, and enhance their value; and BA Managers seeking to improve BA performance and increase customer satisfaction rely on B2T Training. We get it. We’ll help you get it too. B2T Training is an endorsed education provider for the IIBA® and a registered education provider for PMI®.(www.b2ttraining.com)

About The Decision Model

In 2009 Knowledge Partners International introduced The Decision Model, a technology independent model based on the inherent structure of business logic. The model is proposed in a groundbreaking new book The Decision Model: A Business Logic Framework Linking Business and Technology (Taylor & Francis LLC, 2009). The book is written for both the technical and non-technical reader, providing a detailed theoretical framework as well as a real-life approach to adopting The Decision Model in practice in business rules and business transformation projects. It also provides commentary on the use of The Decision Model in an Enterprise and Business Architecture, Service Oriented Architecture, Business Process Management, business requirements, and analysis, as well as management practices in general (www.thedecisionmodel.com).

About Knowledge Partners International LLC

KPI is the thought leader and innovator in the field of Business Decision Modeling and Requirements.  The company’s services enable many of the Global 1,000 companies to discover, organize and manage their business decisions. KPI offers project leadership to help organizations implement KPISTEP and FirstSTEP, leading methodologies in the fields of business decisions, business rules, business process and requirements. The company provides consulting, training, certification, mentorship and knowledge transfer services to ensure that clients become self-sufficient in these areas. (www.kpiusa.com). KPI works closely with software companies to integrate decision modelling and management into new and existing software offerings.