In this article we will discuss a business rules type, where you define how to use your product or service and its corresponding parts.

By the use we could also mean the purpose of your product or service and each of its components.

You might argue that defining the purpose of your product cannot occur after defining implementation and production procedures.

And you would be right.

The use or purpose of your product/service as a whole as well as of its main parts must be defined at the very beginning, as the first step in management business rules.

Note for this blog-post: The chapter on the management business rules type will differ in the book from the original article published in this blog here. The differences consist of the following. Two concepts will be added before the original content. The first is the definition of the product’s/service’s purpose. And the second is the one published in the article “Compare, but don’t … compare”.

At this stage of your business rules definition (after details on production and sustainment), you provide concrete details on the use of the product or service. Many of these can only be understood while or after the details on implementation and production processes are defined.

This business rules type will also differ from the navigation/structure-defining type of the business rules. In the navigation part you decided how your product or service is structured and how you can access one or another part of your product or service.

How is the defining question in the navigation business rules type.

When you consider the use of your product or service, the key question is Why. Why does your customer need this product or its particular part? Why is it important? Why can’t it be replaced with another?

Let us consider what this might mean on concrete examples.

Self-learning and self-help books can serve as great examples to this business rules type. Most of them contain a section or chapter, which is titled in or of versions of “How to use this book”. It is often a part of the Introduction, which is usually written after the book itself is written or planned in detail.

The first example, which I suggest to consider is “Scrivener for Dummies” by Gwen Hernandez.

You are probably familiar with the concept of the books “For Dummies”.

I’ve chosen the one dedicated to Scrivener, since I use this software for writers for all my writing projects, including this one. And because of its light and full of humour style. Deepening my Scrivener skills using this book is a lot of fun for me.

The use of this book is described in the introduction to the book, containing in addition to general information about the book also the following sections:

• Conventions Used in This Book
• What You’re Not to Read
• Foolish Assumptions
• How This Book Is Organized.

The information is these sections summarizes for example what is the book is about and what it is not about:

“This book is not a philosophical work on the theory and value of writing software. In my house, that kind of book would be a doorstop.”

The section “How This Book Is Organized” tells how the book is structured and offers a short description of each of its parts.

And as all books “For Dummies” it contains a legend and conventions for the codes and icons.

You will also find there that you need certain skills to start working with Scrivener, such as clicking and drag and drop, while at the same time there is a simply, fun and memorable explanation how these are done.

Some often used key-combinations are listed in the Introduction as well.

The introduction of this book is a combination of navigation and use business rules. It also summarizes how and with what purpose the book was created, as well as which skills are needed before its use and which will be acquired during and after reading it (implementation and production, as well as management business rules).

Based on this example we can say that the business rules on the use of a product or service:

1. relate directly to management and navigation business rules types and at least partially to the implementation and production rules as well.
2. They specify the skills needed for each procedure during the use/operation of a product/service. This relates to management business rules as well.
3. These rules are partially or completely presented to the end-user of the product or service. They might also vary for various types of users. For example, script-writers are presented in Scrivener with different kind of introduction to the screenplay template than the fiction writers to the two available templates for novels.
4. These rules usually offer a summary of new terminology (including often used abbreviations and acronyms) and of knowledge or results, which are acquired during the use of the product/service.
5. They specify what other conditions (in addition to skills) are mandatory for successful use of the given product/service, such as wireless connection, power, running water, day/night time, minimum/maximum operation temperature and humidity, availability of certain tools and supplies, etc.

I would like to end this article with another example of how to use a non-fiction book. This is an excerpt from a book “Practical Enlightenment”, written by award winning authors Ariel and Shya Kane and which can be found among self-help and spiritual books on Amazon.com . The following quote is from the foreword by the best-selling author Menna van Praag:

“I recommend that you read Practical Enlightenment in the same way you would read a fairy tale. Simply immerse yourself in the story. “Listen” to the words without applying anything as “advice” to fix yourself. This book isn’t a pill to fix your flaws and make you perfect. It’s a light to illuminate inside of you the natural knowing that you already are prefect, exactly as you are. When you experience that, you will experience enlightenment.”

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

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

If you have been following this series of posts on business rules and been applying some of the tips into practice, then by now you would have defined your team and identified what you need to acquire to guarantee your product’s or service’s success. At this point, it is time to think about designing your product or service. And as you do it, you will discover that this is not only about the structure you define for your product or service, but you also need to define how you as a producer and on the other hand the customer are going to navigate your product or service during its creation/production, launch and use.

I have probably puzzled you with this statement. Here are some clues to solve this riddle.

In the post about various business rules types, I illustrated this issue briefly on the example of switching on a vacuum cleaner. The customer being used to how his old vacuum cleaner worked, would try to use it in the same way. So it is your obligation to make your customer aware of how to start using your innovative product and what to do if something is amiss.

Let me illustrate this on a service example. If you are a hairdresser, you will have a different view and the way how your start “using” your shop than your customer. When you enter your shop in the morning, you start by switching off the alarm, switching on the lights and coffee-maker (at least this is what I would do as one of the very first steps, if I would own that shop), then you go to the back of the shop, leave your purse and coat there, wash your hands and start preparing your business for opening. When a customer comes into your hair-dressing shop, she enters it without pulling out any keys, takes her coat off and hangs it on the coat-rack, then finally takes a seat on a sofa or a chair to wait for her turn. Then later when you call her to take a seat on chair in front of a mirror, and you would wheel her chair to a sink to wash her hair or pull the mobile sink to her.

“Wait a minute,” your customer raises her hand to stop my flow in this example. “What do I have to do before I have my hair cut? Shall I make an appointment? If yes, what number shall I call, or can I make an appointment on-line?”

“No, no,” you say. “I work without appointments. You simply come and wait, if I am busy with other customers. But I don’t expect long waiting times.” Then you turn to me and say, “I am not going to have a sink. And neither wash customer’s hair. I am creating one of those express hairdresser shops, where you are served quickly and qualitatively.” You wait a little for me to assess.

I nod. “Ah, OK. Actually, I usually go to one of those.”

You, relieved as if you would think that people might judge for having this in mind, say, “So I just will use a spray bottle with water to wet the hair before cutting.”

After all this brainstorming and seeing your shop from both points of view – yours and that of the customer – you realize that it is much more to it, than just structuring your shop into the front, middle, and back. You might want to think of it functionally, such as office, entrance, waiting, hair-cutting, and cash-register areas. And you need to think how you your customer accesses and uses different areas.

For example, you might not often take a seat on the sofa you’ve purchased for your customers to sit on, while waiting for their turn. Unless of courses you join one or a group of them for a chat and a cup of coffee. Your most frequent use of it will be probably confined to cleaning/dusting it. So, you’ll be its maintainer.

Your customer on the other hand will never enter your office at the back of the shop, unless she is a member of your family or a close friend. So her usual relation to your office would be a mere glance at the opened door and a second of wondering how it might look inside.

I will call again S1000D® (International specification for technical publications) for help. Apart from offering how to define a breakdown (or in other words structure) of a product, it has two very useful terms, which can serve you as tools while designing your product or service.

These are zones and access points.

Their definition in the Specification (S1000D, Issue 4.1, Chapter 3.4, Para 1), might seem a little sophisticated:

“When indicating the location of the Product equipments, assemblies, access doors and panels, ports, etc within data modules and identifying locations for maintenance planning, the Product is divided into areas and sub-areas known as zones.”

To put this in a simpler and more general wording, we can say the zones provide you with another method to structure your product or service in addition to the one you thought of in the first place. So, if you structured your hairdresser-s’ shop functionally into office, cutting, waiting, coffee-machine and other areas, then your zones might be front, middle and back, as well as right, middle and left sides of the shop.

Access points are the points, where you or your customer access the product during its launch or use. These will differ for you and the customer. For example, you and your customer will stay at the different sides of a cash register. She will use the card reader to pay, and you will operate the cash register.

So when planning and designing your product or service, find at least two different ways to structure it: physically and functionally, both from your and your customer’s points of views. Then define the access points for the launch, maintenance, use, trouble shooting, and other scenarios you can think of for the operation of your product or service.

And if you haven’t noticed it yet, let me point out one of the multiple loops in the business rules definition process, which quietly emerged while we discussed your product’s and service’s design. When you structure your product and decide on the best ways to navigate it, you will identify further items or services, as well as further team-players needed to be acquired/employed in addition to those you identified already for your product or service to function.

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