Chapter 10       The Business Vision

RUP - The Business Vision defines a set of goals describing a business  improvement objective. These goals are captured within a Business Vision document.

10.1    The Business Vision Document

The purpose of this document is to collect, analyze and define high-level needs and features of the project. It focuses on the capabilities needed by the stakeholders, and the target users, and why these needs exist.

This vision document contains the following information:

·         Positioning – descriptions of the business needs for the project, including the business opportunity, problem statement and product position statement.

·         Stakeholder and User Descriptions –descriptions of stakeholders in terms of, market demographics, stakeholder and user names and descriptions, the user environment, stakeholder and user needs and project alternatives and competition.

·         Product Overview - a high level view of the product’s capabilities, interfaces to other applications and systems configurations. May include a context diagram showing the scope of the project.

·         Cost and Pricing – records of any cost and pricing constraints that are relevant to the project.

·         Product Features - lists briefly describing the high-level capabilities of system solutions that are necessary to deliver benefits to the users.

·         Constraints - describing any design constraints, external constraints, or other dependencies on the system solution.

·         Quality Ranges – definitions of quality ranges for performance, robustness, fault tolerance, usability, and similar characteristics that are not captured by the product features.

·         Precedence and Priority – definition of system feature priorities.

·         Other Product Requirements – not captured elsewhere.

·         Applicable Standards - capturing standards the product must comply with.

·         System Requirements – definitions of any system requirements necessary to support the product, including the supported host operating systems and network platforms, configurations, memory, peripherals and companion software.

·         Performance Requirements - product performance requirements such as user load factors, bandwidth or communication capacity, throughput, accuracy, reliability or response times under a variety of loading conditions.

·         Environmental Requirements – descriptions of environmental requirements as needed, for hardware.  Environmental issues can include temperature, shock, humidity, radiation, etc.

·         Documentation Requirements - describing the documentation that must be developed to support successful product deployment. Documentation includes, user manuals, online help, installation guides, configuration manuals, ‘Read Me’ files, labeling and packaging.

·         Feature Attributes – attributes of features that can be used to evaluate, track, prioritize and manage the items proposed for implementation. Attributes include, status, benefit, effort, risk, Stability, target release , assigned to and reason for the feature.

Many of the goals making up the vision are project management related and not directly related to an analysis modeling effort. Those of particular interest to the analyst are:

10.1.1     Positioning

Contains high level statements of the objectives of the project. From these statements we can derive what automation is required of the business process.

The Vision statement for a restaurant might be:

I run a successful restaurant in the business area of a large city. It is a very nice restaurant with high-class clientele and excellent food.

In the evenings we hire only the best staff and prepare the best food in its class.

During the day, we entertain all sorts of riff-raff from the area. These customers require fast food of average quality and the minimal service that satisfies their needs for a good lunch; ordered from our cut-down menu of smaller plates organized by categories. During the day we clear the restaurant of its fixtures to allow for more tables with the purpose of serving as many customers in as short a time as possible. The lunchtime customers do not require excellent waiter service, and so we employ cheap unskilled labour to wait the tables. As a result the lunchtime waiters, although cheap, make too many mistakes and are not to be trusted. The aim of this effort is to eliminate lunchtime wait staff to the largest extent possible, while satisfying customer needs, and replace them with an automated system suitable for ordering fast food from our excellent kitchens.

Problem statements derived from this vision may include:

10.1.1.1     Customer Orders

10.1.1.2     Customer Service

10.1.1.3     Stock Keeping

10.1.2     Stakeholder and User Descriptions

Of use to the analyst in order to determine the actors, workers and stakeholders for the project. Possible stakeholders for a restaurant might be:

10.1.2.1     Business Actors

Customer

10.1.2.2     Business Workers

Waiter

Head Waiter

Chef

Cloakroom Attendant

Stock keeper

10.1.2.3     Other Stakeholders

Restaurant Manager[1]

10.1.3     Product Overview

Used by the analyst to define the scope of the analysis effort, supported by a business architecture diagram, showing what business artifacts are in scope for the project. A typical business architecture diagram might look like that in Figure 1:

                                                                                  Figure 1:    Business Architecture Model

Figure 1: shows the possible architecture of a restaurant business. Shaded nodes are in scope for the vision. Non-shaded nodes are project interfaces.

10.1.4     Product Features

Statements of needs that go towards satisfying the business vision. For a restaurant business these might be:

104.1.4.1     A user interface of menu items organized by category, that can be selected by customers.

10.1.4.2     A database of menu items and their ingredients that is automatically maintained and informs the stock keeping staff when items need to be reordered.

10.1.4.3     Automatic updates of the banking system when customer payments are made.

10.1.5     Constraints

External constraints that might be useful to a restaurant menu ordering system might be:

10.1.5.1     Hours of business

10.1.5.2     Maximum seating capacity

10.1.6     Quality

An example fault tolerance characteristic may involving system availability times:

10.1.6.1     System Availability

Customers will be able to order lunch between the hours of 11am and 3pm, without the need of waiter assistance 99.9% of the time.

10.1.7     Performance Requirements

For our restaurant an example performance goal might be:

10.1.7.1     Customer Service Time

To have lunch customers in and out of the restaurant within 1 minute for every $ they spend. For example, a customer whose bill comes to $30 will be in the restaurant for ½ an hour.

10.1.8     Other Product Requirements

Not covered by system features, might be:

The system color scheme will be in keeping with the restaurant theme.

10.2    Summary

The business vision is for the most part, a textual description of the highest-level goals for the project. From an IT perspective, these goals are of major interest to the Project Manager and the Business Analyst.

10.2.1     Project Manager

Will use the business vision to compile an initial schedule, identify resources and give a rough estimate of cost for the project.

10.2.2     Business Analyst

Uses the business vision to identify business use case shells[2], a business architecture and state of the business ‘as-is’ and ‘to-be’ models.