Last month and a half in the time of Optimist Writer’s existence were as exciting as the month of the launch.

Services crystallized from many ideas. Projects started and closed, new started.

Here is a summary of what happened in frame from mid November until today.

I’ve worked with a company in Spain to introduce S1000D into their production cycle for technical publications. It included a 2 plus 2 hours training course and implementation part of less than a week time. The training consisted of theoretical introduction and a few days later we started studying S1000D practically on concrete data of these company. They needed to convert their technical manuals into S1000D conformant information. In the implementation phase I drafted business rules for them using the business rules template in Excel form for Issue 4.1 (available under Downloads for Issue 4.1 at www.s1000d.org) and converted a small manual into S1000D. I am very glad that the company expressed interest to work with me in relation to S1000D also in the coming year.

Very special news and highlight for me personally is the initiation of Resources on business rules in general and S1000D business rules in particular. With these, I give further the experience I gathered in this field and I am very excited about it. These resources will be finalized, revised and published as self-standing books. Depending on the resonance to the S1000D business rules initiative to order the S1000D business rules into a certain sequence / chain, I hope to be able to update this information with every new S1000D Issue.

I am very curious and excited to see what new projects will emerge in the coming year.

Until then I will take a break from posting, but not from creating. Notes are continuously filled in with new ideas and drafts for the future posts and projects. But you will see them first after the New Year’s Eve.

On this note, let me wish, all who connected and worked with me during the starting time of my business, and all who read this, warm and wonderful holidays and the very best for the coming year 2016!!!

After deciding how you are going to produce your first prototype of the product, and how you will launch your service, you need to decide how the regular and routine production/service process will run. In other words you need to define business rules for production and sustainment processes.

This is different from the implementation procedures we talked about last week. Because those are meant to ignite and roll out the process. They are not about the daily routines. Surely, you wouldn’t throw a launch party at your new fashion shop every day. So you can as well cut the Champaign off your supply list for a normal workday at the shop.

Therefore, as soon as you go through those implementation and launch procedures, you forget about them, unless you introduce a new product or service, or a new aspect to the current product.

The production business rules are about repeatable processes as long as the product is on sale. These rules include definition of the quality assurance procedures, trouble shooting, and logistics around it, like transport to and from your site of production or your site of service, and other.

You need to think here in various terms, those of personnel, tools to be used, materials and supplies, time necessary for production, time, tools and supplies needed for fault isolation, diagnostics and removal of failure. You would also need to see what part of the process can be done automatically, or which of it you can outsource. And do not forget to adjust your process flow and the time-frame when you introduce something new into the process.

Do not think, “It will work out somehow.” Especially in case of small businesses, this thinking could be tempting. But it can be dangerous for your business. If you decide to do any of the procedures by yourself, then this decision must be done deliberately and upfront, and not because of the sudden need.

I have re-learned this lesson recently, while widening the range of my blog posts. Before I launched my business, I was publishing one blog-post a week. And I often forgot to allocate time for it in my calendar. I did feel the tickle of the deadline (the notification mails were going out on Wednesdays then), so I diligently fulfilled the task. But it often happened in the evenings, after all was accomplished for the family and the household. This was working when I was on maternity leave, and it was duly justified. But it wasn’t working after my daughter started with day-care and I started my business.

Due to two branches in my business (writing and business-oriented) I started publishing two posts a week, and once a month even three, together with the Newsletter. Then I started working on free resources on my web-site, offering since recently three types of them.

This whole work cannot be done as a hobby. This approach would not work for a very long, and I as my own employer need to see that I get my share of sleep in order to be able to work properly. So, there is only one possibility. I have to reserve time and give these activities the necessary priority and resources and make them a part of my working process.

Working on them now (it is shortly before Christmas) will also differ from how I will work on those projects after the New Year’s Eve. Since I don’t have many external projects at the end of the year, then I can devote more time for developing the resources I offer and producing as much content as possible. But in the new year, I will have projects, which will need my personal attendance and participation, so there will be less time for developing resources. All this needs to be taken into account.

Also for your business, see if there is any seasonal influence on your production/service process. And how the completion of one project will affect the process. You might need to relocate your resources because of this.

Remember that as any other type of the business rules we talked so far, the production/sustainment business rules are a very living part of your business documentation. It is probably one of the most dynamic of the whole set of rules you have to define and you will need to verify and adjust it frequently.

And here is an Aha/Huh-moment for me as I write this article: This adjustment and verification must become a part of the routine production/sustainment process.

This post is a part of “Business rules: General”, copyright © 2015-2016 by Victoria Ichizli-Bartels

By now you have a design of your product or service, which you are of course open to adjust as you go along with the process of business rules definition. You have the team responsible for all of this to come true. And you know what you need to acquire for your product or service to be realized. Today it is time to think about how you are going to implement the design of your product or service with all the means that you have or have planned to acquire.

Here are the two definitions of the word “implementation” given by the Free Dictionary:

1. the act of accomplishing some aim or executing some order.
2. the act of implementing (providing a practical means for accomplishing something); carrying into effect

Yes, these are basically two main aspects you need to think of, when you bring your product or service to life.

Reversing the order of the definitions above and adjusting the meaning to our context, we could say the following.

First, you have to think how you are going to carry out the process implementation and what you need to do it. This will relate to the acquisition aspect of business rules. But there is more to it. You need to think what resources you have to allocate for the implementation. If you regularly implement something new (a product or a process), then you might need permanent personnel responsible for this. If you are a small venture, then you would need to allocate time resources, meaning that some of the maintenance projects would be put on-hold or will have to run somehow on their own, until you have implemented something new.

You might not need to plan all of the details of how this exactly will take place. You simply won’t be able to until you try. But you need to be aware of this, and in case you have large projects and undertakings, you might want to hire someone to coordinate the work and possible also to carry out these steps.

Time allocation and giving your product and service a high priority during this time, both on your and your partners’ sides, is crucial.

I have experienced many times, both being that additional partner or in other words point of contact on customer side and being the one helping to define business rules, that time allocation and prioritizing is something which is often neglected. It won’t move your project any further if your partner is overloaded with other projects and doesn’t have any time for your common undertaking. Since you are a primary responsible for your product or service, you have to emphasize this from the very beginning and officially agree on this with your partners. Best in written form. All players in the game must be committed. Otherwise, the outcome might be uncomfortable for all sides.

Secondly, you need to carry out the implementation process in certain order. It might differ considerably from the normal operation process. In case of S1000D® and technical publications based on it, you even need a flow for business rules definition, since there are 552 decision points where you need to address (including the possible decisions to ignore those out of the scope of the given project), (often in recurring order) in order to prepare a successful implementation of S1000D.

This need prompted me to initiate a Resources page in order to study and offer a possible approach for the implementation process of S1000D business rules production.

Thus for successful implementation of your product or service, you need to do the following:

• Allocate time and other necessary resources (including personnel and material means) for your product/service.
• Make your product/service be of the highest priority during that time.
• Make sure that the above two apply both for you and the partners in your project.
• Define a step-by-step process flow (at least major steps) for the implementation process.
• Be prepared to be flexible both in modifying the process and allocating/finding resources.

This post is a part of “Business rules: General”, copyright © 2015-2016 by Victoria Ichizli-Bartels