CHAPTER FIVE
Using DRA in Knowledge Automation Projects
LET ME SUMMARIZE OUR PROGRESS SO FAR. We have remodeled our business processes, identifying a set of decision points that will be automated by encapsulating our organization's business knowledge in decision services. We have defined the structure of the decision-making to be implemented at these decision points using Decision Requirements Analysis (DRA). As a result we have a complete set of high-level functional requirements for knowledge automation, expressed as business process flows and Decision Requirements Diagrams (DRDs) with supporting documentation. Now we need to design, implement, and deploy a set of decision services to meet these requirements.
Such projects can be fraught with problems, and many of these problems result from a lack of structure. This chapter provides some advice on how these problems can be mitigated, or completely avoided, by using the decision structure revealed in the DRDs as a template to provide a structure for the project, a structure for knowledge discovery, a structure for the design, and a structure for the implementation.
DRA IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT
The decision structure revealed through DRA has several important roles in ensuring a well-managed knowledge automation project:
- It provides a basis for a clear contractual definition of the scope of the project.
- It provides metrics for estimation of effort and timescales.
- It suggests a structure for project and resource planning.
- It allows ...
