Integrating iGrafx FlowCharter and Rational Requisite Pro

While working on a Business Architecture effort several years ago, I collaborated on developing a new internal standard for business process and business capability description. From my perspective, a business capability is the required function or desired service that a business unit performs and the business process is the set of methods employed to realize the business capability. Business capabilities and business processes can be described as current or future state. Their description can also be scaled for strategic or tactical objectives.

This article will present an approach for documenting and aligning business capabilities, business processes, and functional requirements by integrating two distinct tools that leverage robust repositories and object metadata.

In my organization, we have ample tools and deliverable templates on hand to enable the Business Analyst to document artifacts in visual and textual form. We use iGrafx FlowCharter from Corel to draw the business process models. This tool is familiar to our business clients who already participate in our Six Sigma projects. It is more powerful than Microsoft Visio because it has an object repository built-in. It also has simulation capability for predicting business process model performance.

As a Business Analyst leading Business Architecture activities, I experimented with drawing swimlane-style business process models using standard notation, naming convention, and symbols in iGrafx. We adopted the core elements of the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) standard to establish repeatable modeling methodology across project teams. The standard required that we differentiate roles, activities, business objects, business rules, and business events. The standard deliberately called for capturing the who, the how, the what, the why, and the when. By applying this rigor, we made the business process model more than a visual representation. We used iGrafx’s repository to store a comprehensive collection of metadata across business process models.

Here is an illustrative copy of our internal standard for reference. The examples used below were for processing security trades for our Vanguard mutual funds.

Our intention was to leverage the repository as a springboard for subsequent requirements elicitation and analysis. Here is a copy of the revised business process model with the standard elements marked for reference.

Click to View Larger Image

The iGrafx application has a utility that produces a text file containing selective metadata that you input and specify for export. Here is a corresponding export for some of the business process model activities shown above:

This export shows the notes collected about a business object. We captured the preliminary data characteristics of the object in free form text.

As an alternative, discrete characteristics can be created as custom metadata for each object in iGrafx. The attributes you see here for events and rules are an example.

If the team maintaining the business process model has the discipline to input and maintain the metadata, then this export utility can be useful in downstream requirements elicitation and analysis.

Once the business process models and metadata were documented, the Business Architecture team analyzed the future state business process models to identify business capabilities. From there, the Business Analyst differentiated the business vs. system capabilities. System capabilities were merely business capabilities enabled via an automated or semi-automated solution. Here is an example of some capabilities derived from the future state business model.

• Communicate Trade Details to Role 2
• Validate Trade Detail Completeness
  • Identify Missing Trade Detail
  • Communicate Missing Trade Details to Role 1
  • Resolve Missing Trade Details
• Validate Trade Detail Against Accepted Values
  • Identify Accepted Values Exceptions
  • Communicate Accepted Values Exceptions
  • Resolve Accepted Values Exceptions
• Communicate Trade Details to Role 3
• Collect Acknowledgment of Delivered Trade

Next, we imported selected iGrafx information into our requirements management tool, IBM’s Rational RequisitePro. The analysis of roles, activities, business objects, business rules, and business events served as a framework for requirements decomposition. We created specific requirement types in RequisitePro to house the business capabilities, system capabilities, system functions, and business rules (e.g. BCAP, CAP, FUNC, RULE).

An example of the BCAP properties is shown below:

Why would we copy this information from one repository to another? Well, we used ReqPro baseline the business capabilities, to decompose system capabilities into system functions, and then to directly capture, store, and trace detailed requirements as follows:

Note: The business events were not maintained as a separate requirement type in RequisitePro since they served as triggers for business activities. The business roles and objects were actually embedded as a consistent reference in the functional requirements.

By importing metadata from iGrafx directly into RequisitePro, we were able to save administrative time. More importantly, we used the information to align requirements with future state capabilities, ensure that system functions were decomposed into detailed requirements, leverage first draft business rules, and verify that business events and business objects were integrated into the functional requirements.

Conclusion
We used two tools with two different strong suits for a single objective – to iteratively discover, define, and document business requirements. By employing business process models and the iGrafx repository during Business Architecture, we were able to get an early start on recognizing, categorizing, and recording business information that would be valuable in later phases of the project.

Knowledge of business roles, activities, objects, rules, and events is essential for Business Analysts when analyzing requirements but it also proved useful to Technical and Data Architects when designing system solutions. They referenced the business context when they looked for design patterns and created a service-oriented architecture.

By importing metadata from the iGrafx objects into RequisitePro, we were able to fully develop the requirements and ensure that they aligned with the business vision. Integration of these two robust tools empowered our Business Analysts to perform more thorough analysis and to deliver requirements that stemmed directly from business process models. 

Author: Susan Block, CBAP, is Lead Business Systems Analyst at The Vanguard Group in Malvern, PA and VP of Professional Development for the IIBA Philadelphia Chapter.