The new Business Rules Document (brDoc) Schema, introduced in the S1000D Issue 4.2, possesses excellent potential, and I believe it will help reduce the duration and costs of the business rules production and maintenance as well as increase their quality.

But like any new construct in a standard and specification, it raises the question, “What is it good for?”

And when it comes to the S1000D business rules, especially the specification’s seasoned users will naturally ask such questions as, “Doesn’t the Business Rules Exchange (BREX) Schema, which was introduced earlier, already cover the business rules aspects?”

I have given answers to these questions from my point of view in the latest article for the Mekon’s Bitesize series on business rules.

Click the title of the article to find out more: “Understanding the Business Rules Document (brDoc) Schema.”

(Credits: Photograph ©librestock.com under the keyword “document”)

In the previous articles, I contribute to Mekon’s Bitesize articles on Business Rules, I mentioned about the importance of defining the business rules before signing contracts, and also about the sequence or order in business rules definition.

In the most recent article in this series, titled “Why Does It Make Sense to Generate a Business Rules Index First and a Guidance Document Second?”, I address the flow of business rules definition process in more detail, but especially the form of it.

In my opinion, it is much more sensible to have all business rules recorded as an index with all the necessary information and guidance attached to each entry, than to start with a flowing text, as it is usual for contracts and statements of work.

And above that, I think you should start with creating an index (before signing contracts) and keep it as a master knowledge base of all decisions, and then extract information out of it to create all the guides, the contracts, and statements of work.

You can find the reasons why I think so in this article here.

(Credits: Photograph ©canva.com under the keyword “format”)

When I published my first book on S1000D “S1000D Issue 4.1 Untangled” last year, I have offered a Microsoft Excel® file along with it, which contained the main content of the book and offered a possibility for projects to copy-paste and use its content in their business rules Excel files.

I released “S1000D® Issue 4.1 and Issue 4.2 Navigation Map” this year and took it with me to the S1000D User Forum in Amsterdam. Almost immediately after learning about the new book, several participants who knew and used the “S1000D Issue 4.1 Untangled” asked me, whether I made a similar Excel file for the new book.

My answer then (June 2017) was that no, I didn’t create such a file since the new book contained the information the first book lacked, and for which I primarily created the Excel file. This purpose was the references to the chapters and paragraphs of the specification where the Business Rules Decisions Points (BRDP) are defined.

Later I realized that the Excel file based on my S1000D books could not only be used to track references inside the S1000D text but also for its application as a template for the BR definition. That is why S1000D working groups offered the BRDP Index in Excel format in the S1000D download package of Issue 4.1 in the first place. And I recalled that the BRDP Groups / S1000D Topics I have identified in the books I compiled, were utterly useful to filter the BRDP relevant for the projects and organizations in each stage and context of their S1000D implementation.

So I decided to create a Tools page on my website offering a variety of content both on S1000D and other topics.

The S1000D content both for Issue 4.1 and Issue 4.2 is now available for purchase and use.

I am working now on a resource based on my book “Take Control of Your Business” which introduces the notion of business rules to the general public. Later I will add further content on various topics including self-gamification and writing.

You can find more details on this new page here. I hope the information you will find there will help you in your projects and undertakings.

In a book I published earlier this year I wrote the following:

“Not many want to think about terminating the existence of their product or service, hoping it will be there forever.

But it won’t. At least not in its very first shape or version. Besides, the updates might be so crucial that at some point you will have something entirely new and different than merely an upgraded product or service.

I can guarantee that sooner or later you will need to discard one (and most probably more) of your products or services or various parts of them.”

“Take Control of Your Business: Learn what Business Rules are, discover that you are already using them, then update them to maximize your business success.”

I didn’t think I would need to terminate one of my books that soon after the start of my business (not yet two years), but I know it is a correct decision.

What happened is the following. Last year I published a resource for the S1000D community titled “S1000D Issue 4.1 Untangled.” It arranged 552 Business Rules Decisions Points (BRDP) defined by the specification and also added several new ones into a sequential chain for the S10000D implementation. The book was very well received by the community.

This year I have published a follow-up resource named “S1000D® Issue 4.1 and Issue 4.2 Navigation Map.” It could not serve as a new edition of the “S1000D Issue 4.1 Untangled” because this time the book covered two issues of the specification and also showed the relationship between them when it came to the Business Rules Decision Points.

The “S1000D Issue 4.1 Untangled” continued to sell after the publishing of the second book. I realized that it only sold because of its lower price and that situation didn’t feel good.

If we compare the “S1000D Issue 4.1 Untangled” and “S1000D® Issue 4.1 and Issue 4.2 Navigation Map,” it is clear that the former is of the lower quality than the latter. Therefore, I have unpublished it.

To compensate for the possible inconvenience, I have considerably reduced the price for the “S1000D® Issue 4.1 and Issue 4.2 Navigation Map.”

You can find the reasons of un-publishing “S1000D Issue 4.1 Untangled” and the new prices for the “S1000D® Issue 4.1 and Issue 4.2 Navigation Map” on the “S1000D Issue 4.1 Untangled” page here.

When I gave my presentation at the S1000D User Forum in Amsterdam in June this year, with the title “How to Accelerate S1000D Implementation by Slowing Down”, I have mentioned that users working with it sometimes complain about too many players in an S1000D project. I then named several of the many different roles involved in or related to a project implementing S1000D.

This statement was met with nods during the presentation. Later at the coffee break, several participants at the forum stressed how true this statement was and how this fact was sometimes forgotten, ignored, or even that many in a department or organization implementing S1000D were simply not aware of that.

This recent memory of discussions at the forum moved me to write a short article for the Mekon‘s Bitesize on Business Rules series to point this out again and also explain why knowing who is involved in the S1000D implementation process (even if remotely) is so important, also for business rules definition.

Click the title of the article to find out more: “The S1000D community is a big family – an S1000D project is a big family too.”

(Credits: Photograph ©librestock.com under the keyword “family”)
  

P.S. These two books were displayed at the User Forum (click on the image to check out the book details):