Chapter 5 The Business Vision

RUP - The Business Vision defines the set of goals and objectives at which the business modeling effort is aimed. These goals and objectives are captured by a Business Vision document.

1.1    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 information is organized into the following subsections:

Positioning - This section describes the business needs for the project, including the business opportunity, problem statement and product position statement.

Stakeholder and User Descriptions – this section describes 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 - This section provides a high level view of the product’s capabilities, interfaces to other applications and systems configurations. This section includes product perspectives, product functions and assumptions and dependencies. It is supplemented by a context diagram showing the scope of the project.

Cost and Pricing - This section records any cost and pricing constraints that are relevant to the project. Examples are, distribution costs, or other cost of goods sold constraints, manuals, packaging, licensing and installation costs.

Product Features - Lists and briefly describes the the high-level capabilities of the systems that are necessary to deliver benefits to the users. Each feature is an externally desired service that typically requires a series of inputs to achieve the desired result. This is described by a use case model.

Constraints - Notes any design constraints, external constraints, or other dependencies on the product.

Quality Ranges - Defines quality ranges for performance, robustness, fault tolerance, usability, and similar characteristics that are not captured by the Feature Set.

Precedence and Priority - Defines the priority of the system features.

Other Product Requirements – Not captured elsewhere.

Applicable Standards - Captures all standards the product must comply with.

System Requirements – Defines 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 - Details 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 - Describes environmental requirements as needed, for hardware.  Environmental issues can include temperature, shock, humidity, radiation, etc.

Documentation Requirements - Describes 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 - Features are to be given attributes that can be used to evaluate, track, prioritize and manage the product items proposed for implementation. Attributes include, status, benefit, effort, risk, Stability, target release , assigned to and reason for the feature.

1.2       Components Of A Business Model

RUP describes the purpose of Business Modeling as:

·         To ensure that customers, end users, developers, and other parties have a common understanding of the organization.

·         To assess the impact of organizational change.

·         To understand current problems in the target organization and identify improvement potentials. 

·         To derive the software system requirements needed to support the target organization.

·         To understand how a to-be-deployed software system fits into the organization.

The BUC model describes the vision in a graphical form using UML.

The organization is described by a business architecture model. The business processes are captured by the BUC model. The system requirements are captured by the BUC realization.

1.2.1     Organization Model

The business organization is shown in Figure 1: as a class diagram. (Any appropriate diagram type, for example a deployment diagram., may be used to describe the organization. I have chosen a class diagram because my tool, Visio, will allow me to re-use the classes on other diagrams, such as a sequence diagram.)

The example in Figure 1: is of a restaurant organization.

                                                                               Figure 1:    Business Organization Diagram

The Supplier, Customer and Bank are all outside of the scope of the organization.

Receiving receives goods from Suppliers. Accounts receives the bill for the goods from Receiving. The Kitchen receives the kitchen goods from Receiving. Stock Taking is informed of the goods received from Receiving. The kitchen informs Stock Taking of current stock levels. Stock Taking orders goods from Suppliers, as appropriate. The Restaurant Management orders food items from the Kitchen. Restaurant Management handles all Customer relations for the restaurant. Accounts is informed of Takings from Restaurant Management. Accounts handles restaurant finance with the Bank.

The business organization model simply shows the various departments of the organization and how they communicate. The business use case model shows why they communicate.

1.2.2     Business Use Case Model

Business Use Cases (BUCs) describe a function performed by the business. Some typical restaurant BUCs might be:

Serve Customer, Receive Goods, Maintain Stock Levels, Balance Books. These BUCs are shown in the BUC diagram in .

Who gets benefit from the use cases? The answer is up for discussion, but I look to use actors from outside of the organization first. If the primary actor is within the organization, maybe what is being described is not a complete BUC.