Nowhere is the need to implement and manage
change more acute than within government agencies, nonprofits, and commercial
businesses. Changing regulations, changing customer needs, new direction set by
changing leadership, and the necessity to launch bigger, better, different
products more and more quickly mean changes are inevitable. These situations
not only trigger internal changes, but alter how an organization will manage
its public interactions. In addition, an organization must determine how it will
manage the impact of change within already established business systems and IT
processes, most of which are already quite complex.
Change can trigger the need to meet tight
deadlines; to update systems, forms, and websites; and to ensure understanding
and acceptance across disparate constituencies, including employees,
contractors, and the public. The need to change forces consideration of a
variety of questions, such as:
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For changes imposed
upon an organization from the outside, what does compliance mean?
- How will change impact
an organization’s ability to achieve its goals?
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How widespread is the
impact of change, and how can an organization effectively prioritize addressing
those impacts with the resources, time, and money available to it?
These challenges are complex. Organizational
leadership and staff must understand and successfully communicate the need to change.
The organization must also have capability to identify and measure the impact
of the change, develop the business and technology requirements for what must
change, design and implement the necessary changes, and, finally, test the
modifications made to systems and processes, and validate for future operations.
Ability to change in question
While government, nonprofits, and businesses all
recognize the constancy of change, few organizations are proactively prepared
to address change in an organized, efficient, and effective manner. Thus, when
the imperative to change occurs, most organizations are relegated to an “all
hands on deck”, “man the torpedoes”, “cost is no object” strategy to address
the imperative. Since the majority of change imperatives come with a deadline,
the risk of disruption to an organization’s long term strategy, short term
tactics, and overall health can be quite significant.
A recent survey by Robbins Gioia provides
evidence that organizations are not planning for change.
- A whopping 91% of
respondents felt some degree of challenge when having to respond to regulatory
changes, especially those with a deadline. Nearly 21% reported this to be “very
challenging” for their organization.
- There is also concern
about losing institutional knowledge due to retirement and job changes. In
fact, 91% of respondents expressed some degree of concern about this. A full
32% said they were “very concerned” about this problem.
- And finally, 86% of
respondents reported that they held some degree of concern about the amount of
time it takes to get a new product out the door. 21% indicated that they were
“very concerned” about this.
A proactive approach to managing change
The survey explored one practice in particular
that, once implemented, can significantly reduce the time, cost, and risk of
managing change. That practice is the capture, documentation, and tracing of
business rules.
Business rules are operating principles or self-imposed
constraints that apply across all operations and systems of an organization.
The need for the existence of a business rule may be triggered by internal or
external policies, practices or regulations. The power of capturing,
documenting, and tracing business rules to the processes and systems that are
impacted is significant. Business rules are:
Changes, particularly significant changes,
affect business rules. Regulatory changes, for example, inevitably impact the
business rules the guide an organization’s operations. Changes in tax laws,
healthcare policies, zoning codes, and, even changes in product features and
functions, will impact the rules by which a business or government entity
operates.
In spite of the clear utility of understanding
business rules and their applications, 93% (126 of 136) of organizations
responding to the recent survey reported that their organization is challenged
when it comes to capturing and maintaining business rules. In fact, 27%
reported they were “very challenged” in this area.
BAs help create Invaluable Assets
If business rules describe the framework and
constraints that impact an action that an organization may take, business
analysts (BAs) are best equipped and positioned to help reduce organizational
uncertainty — and, therefore, risk — by carefully documenting an organization's
sometimes obscure processes and rules. This work can be painstaking, but a
comprehensive approach helps an organization to operate more consistently, adds
predictably to projects and planning, and, in the case of rapid and
unanticipated change, may provide an organization a significant competitive
advantage.
It would be impossible to overemphasize the
value of having an organization's business rules documented and maintained by
professional business analysts. To have requirements, workflows, rules, and
overall process models captured in an on-going, living data and requirements
repository and available for use for any effort would be invaluable. Yet, 69%
of those organizations surveyed reported that they do not use a business rules
repository.
Such assets and models become valuable
property and tangible company assets, available to jump-start future process
improvement and new product development undertakings. Such models lay the
foundation for an organization's continuous optimization efforts based on solid
understanding of rules, requirements, and business process models. These models
provide the capability to determine that when X changes, A, B, and C are also
impacted and must change as well.
Who took the survey
RG set up an online survey that got 146
responses. Of these participants, the majority was from government agencies and
nonprofits, 40% (58). Others came from across private industry:
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16% of respondents came
from the financial world, banking, investment, and insurance
- 12% of respondents
were from the professional services, such as accounting
-
Manufacturing and
transportation made up 10% of respondents
-
High tech, telecommunications,
and utilities made up 9%of respondents
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The remaining
respondents constituted 13% including travel and leisure, advertising, and
retail.
You can take the Business Rules Survey.
Find it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RGBusinessRules.
Author: Sandy Sears, PMP, CBAP, SA, PMI-PBA, is the Director,
Financial Services Team, for Robbins Gioia.
As a former executive at a large insurance company, she was responsible
for IT process and practice development and was a key player in a large IT
transformation effort, leading the rollout of project management, business
analysis, and testing practices and tools across the organization, as well as
the development of standardized processes for project portfolio management, IT
financial management, and the SDLC. At a previous company, she was the
recipient of the prestigious Chairman’s Award for her work in introducing a new
annuity product line in Tokyo, Japan.
She has been a speaker at industry conferences, for professional and
education organizations, and on radio shows.