Business rules type outlining how to implement the design of your product or service

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:

the act of accomplishing some aim or executing some order.
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.