Want to learn how to write business rules? Writing Business Rules should be easy. After all, you’re documenting how the business works, right? This shouldn’t be too hard as you’d assume everyone knows how it works. It’s how they do thing every day. Alas, that’s not always the case.
Download these Business Rules Templates (MS Word/Excel) to clarify the appropriate action (i.e. rule) that needs to be taken and remove any ambiguity regarding the correct course of action that must be followed.
Use these Business Rules Templates to describe how company policies or practices apply to a specific business activity. As you model your business processes, you can capture business rules as separate elements and weave them into your process flows. In addition, you can customize these templates to create functional business rules to calculate values, and perform tasks for financials, budgets, and workflows.
After finishing a recent technical writing project for a bank, they asked if I could look at their business rules library. While I’d heard of business rules mentioned in vague terms, it was an area I’d no practical experience of documenting.
Next day, the business analyst team walked me through their business rules library – think of it as a handbook for all existing business rules and you have the idea – and showed me their templates, examples and guidelines. It was getting clearer, but I still needed more direction.
How to define Business Rules?
Let’s start with a simple definition:
Business Rules tell an organization what it can do in detail; Strategy explains how to focus the business. Strategy provides high-level direction, whereas business rules provide detailed guidance about how a strategy can be translated to action. [Wikipedia]
From another angle, business rules work like procedures or Work Instructions. They’re very granular (ie low-level instructions) and define a single task.
to apply for a bank loan, the business rules require that you meet five conditions. If you don’t, the application is rejected.
There are also different categories of business rules. According to the Business Rules Group, business rules falls into one of four categories:
As I mentioned above, Business Rules are not dissimilar to standard operating procedures. With this in mind, you can use numbering and naming conventions that mirror that way you’d control SOPs.
BR refers to business rule
123 to the document number
Fin to the Finance Dept
US to the US offices and
1_1 to the document version
With this in mind, here are three sample business rules:
One thing I learned was that while some rules were a single line, others were more complex.
For example, to document the business rule correctly you need to capture:
While I am no business rules expert, I can see that there is a problem here.
The term “business rule” means different things to different people.
To a business analyst, it can mean a business level requirement that may, or may not, be represented in a taxonomy.
But, to a Database Administrator, it could mean a requirement in the database, which may or may not, be easy to enforce.
I’ll try to share more ideas on business rules as I get a deeper understanding of how they work.
Like I said, this is a new area for me, so please jump in.
