Introduction To Business Rules | BusinessAnalystMentor.com

When an organisation and the people within it properly understand, capture and document business rules, understanding and dealing with change is much easier. The change impact analysis is clear and unambiguous and the implementation plan can be managed successfully with shared understanding among all relevant stakeholders. 

Therefore, business rules analysis, as a systematic approach to identifying, documenting, and managing business rules within an organisation is among the most powerful tools at a business analyst’s disposal.

The process of business rules analysis involves a detailed examination of the company’s existing processes, workflow, and decision-making framework. By properly analysing all these aspects of the organisation, a business analyst can discover implicit or hidden rules governing and influencing business operations and define easily accessible and explicit rules, helping stakeholders to understand and follow them properly and consistently. 

Of course, this requires meticulous work on extracting business rules from the organisation’s procedure documents, policy statements, filings, product descriptions, and other relevant documentation. These types of sources are commonly referred to as explicit. Some rules will need to be extracted from tacit sources or “tribal knowledge, such as corporate culture norms, undocumented stakeholder know-how, or general business practices. 

In some cases, especially in organisations with more complex structures and multiple different departments, certain rules may conflict depending on the area of the company they’re applied in. When identifying, eliciting, and documenting business rules, business analysts will likely have to rely on several different techniques for their toolbox, such as interviews, surveys, workshops, use cases, and decision tables. 

It’s up to the business rules analysis process to help navigate through these complex processes and provide clear guidance for the discovery of business rules, as well as identify processes, events, roles, and data these business rules impact.