Larry Ward is a Quality Assurance Project Manager in the OPERS Information Systems Division for the State of Oregon. He has more than 30 years experience in systems analysis & design, Industrial Engineering, Project Management, and QA. He has more than ten years of experience with the business rules approach. Ward was instrumental in designing the OPERS business rules process. He has also managed Rational RequisitePro® and ClearCase® database requirements and content, and assisted in developing tools and processes to update the rule databases.
OPERS provides state, local, and higher education agencies with compensation and retiree health insurance programs having more that $47 billion in managed assets. OPERS started the business rules project in 1998 using an IT-driven, business rules methodology. A few months ago they began migrating the legacy systems (Word and Excel) to a web-based system.
Shifting to a business-rules approach caused rapid change with cascading impacts. OPERS is a heavily regulated state agency. Legislation drives most of the changes, which carry significant litigation impacts. Court rulings can result in the need for rapid changes to the business rules.
The business requirements were to increase business and systems agility by creating technical solutions behind the business processes in the form of process models, process metrics, business rules and procedures, stakeholder needs and other specifications. Ward took a different approach, going away from the traditional IT driven solution to a BPM business-driven solution starting with creation of the business models and rules, and from legacy silos to web-based applications.
The process owners defined what the processes were. The old, IT created method was modeled for system implementation. Few metrics were designed into the system and the stakeholders could be captured but not traced. Databases were updated manually.
In the process-driven model, the rules were business-driven and modeled for process improvement. Metrics were built into the system and the stakeholders could be captured and traced. The processes were modeled across the functions and across the whole organization. Database updating was automated. Thirty-five core business processes were identified. OPERS chose IBM Rational RequisitePro® to create the repositories.
The management challenges included:
- Database maintenance process
- Knowledge of tool capabilities
- Rule availability to end-users (available on intranet)
- Too much work and too little time
- Major and multiple minor development projects requiring accurate and rapid availability of rules
The Business Rules (Requirements) Transaction Application (BRTA) was developed in-house to update all the databases including a quality assurance function. BRTA consolidates responsibilities from systems staff to the business users. The primary user is the Business Rules Writing Team. The secondary use is independent QA reviews. Manual updates to the Rational Systems business rules database repositories were automated so that the database and repositories agree at any point in time.
The keys to OPERS BPM-driven approach are:
- Build business process models: inputs/outputs, steps, workflows, stakeholder needs, rules, and responsibilities
- Identify business rules that support business process models
- Create business and system requirement traceability matrix
- Drive requirements through implementation and change management
There has been substantial improvement since this BPM project began. For the QA business rules documents, the manual process took 3 to 20 hours weekly. Now it takes only 1 to 2 hours a week. Copying data into RequisitePro took 5 to 20 hours and now takes no time at all. The same is true for updating Word documents and the business rules saving 13 to 40 hours a week. It used to take 2 to 3 weeks to approve rules and make them available to users and now it takes 3 to 5 days. Ward said the process improvements have been astronomical.
