Category Archives: Business Rules

When you start a business, you make a set of choices and decisions or choices. And you record them in your business plan.

When you come up with an idea for a product or service, you also make choices, and you record those in one way or another as decisions too. Some people call the collection of the product related decisions business rules.

You can find many useful templates for business plans, but you won’t find many of them for business rules. Or at least not simplified ones as those you can find in many variations for business plans.

Similar to business plans, the decisions you take toward your product or service, the business rules, can be structured in many different ways. But whatever method you choose or invent it will always be connected to the lifespan, or life cycle, of your product or service.

This article is not written to teach new terms. It is to introduce you to a tool which will equip you with a two-pages list of questions, which by answering it, will allow you to get an overview what a life cycle of a product embraces. You will identify what is missing, and what you could improve. By turning all the Nos, you have answered, into Yeses, you will get in control of your products, services as well as your business.

This tool is not offered for free. Especially when it comes to developing products, we all need to have a sense of investment. But its price, $4.99, is low enough to make it not only affordable (a bit more than a cup of coffee) but also attractive, since you will hardly find anything similar either in brevity and exactness or price on the topic of business rules.

And you do need to understand what business rules are and what understanding them can offer you. Because you already deal with business rules on a daily basis. Simply because you always make one or another decision on your products and services.

So if you would like to find out more about this simple yet effective set of questions that will let you start a sound foundation of the knowledge base for the decisions you make on your products and services, then go to the Tools page on this site (optimistwriter.com) and click on “The Business Rules Memo.”

I am on the way to finish the second self-edit and revision of my book introducing Business Rules and explaining its importance for any kind of business. You can see the very first and raw draft of it here.

During this second revision I realized that something didn’t work. I discovered that I had put acquisition (of both tangible and non-tangible means) for a given product or service before the planning the user interface and before marketing the product.

This sequence does have its justification when we talk about concrete actions. You need first to acquire the necessary manpower, knowledge, tools, supplies, etc., before you can develop your product or service, create a corresponding user interface, and finally when it is ready, you put it on the market.

But this is not true when it comes to planning. When you plan something, then you first need to have a good idea how your product is going to look and feel like when used. And even before that you would need to identify your customer base, which is the first and foremost part of marketing.

On the other hand you will have to perform a number of acquisition actions before your product or service can go into design phase. You would need certain hardware and software, and your team or yourself would need to acquire the necessary skills.

While the product or service is being designed, and even when created, produced and maintained, the user interface will change its appearance and functionalities, which will call for the appropriate action while marketing and further acquisition.

So I guess all the above may have contributed to my confusion on what to put first when defining a product’s or service’s business rules: business rules on user interface and marketing or what is necessary to acquire for this product or service to exist.

I think the main and also quite exciting challenge can be concluded as follows. When you define your product’s or service’s business rules, you are in a way already implementing your product or service. You might find yourself acquiring not only the necessary knowledge about your customer base but also practically at the same time getting the needed team together, the necessary hardware and software to develop your app. You might not wait with all that until you declare your business rules released and official in their first version. Or you might. It is up to you.

P.S. An interesting observation. There is only one letter, which repeats in the word Manipulate. This is “A”. Curiously, I have confused the position of the types starting only with this letter and not with the other ones.

Copyright © 2016 by Victoria Ichizli-Bartels