Activity: Detail a Business Worker

Purpose Describe the responsibilities of a business worker. Identify the competence requirements of a business worker. Ensure that the business worker is able to perform its responsibilities.
Role: Business Designer
Frequency: As required, starting in Inception iterations and occurring most frequently in elaboration and construction iterations.
Steps Determine Areas of Responsibility Define Operations Define Attributes Describe Competence Requirement Analyze Relationships Evaluate Your Results
Input Artifacts: Business Analysis Model Business Rule Business System Business Use Case Business Use-Case Realization Business Worker Project Specific Guidelines Supplementary Business Specification	Resulting Artifacts: Business Worker
Tool Mentors: Detailing Business Workers and Entities Using Rational Rose
More Information: Guideline: Business Worker Guideline: Diagrams in the Business Analysis Model

Workflow Details:

Business Modeling
- Refine Roles and Responsibilities

Determine Areas of Responsibility

Make sure you have access to descriptions of all workflows in which the business worker participates. Also, you may need descriptions of the business workers with which this business worker communicates, as well as business entities accessed.

Decide the business worker's areas of responsibilities within each business use-case realization. Briefly describe each responsibility in the business worker's responsibility section.

Write step-by-step instructions for each operation that describe what the person acting as the business worker must do. These detailed work instructions could be used either as guidelines or as a prescriptive recipe for performing the work. The choice depends on the culture and type of business. Highly skilled and motivated knowledge workers prefer ad-hoc work processes so that they have the freedom to optimally perform the process for a particular situation. However, environments in which there are potentially disastrous consequences (such as an operator in a nuclear plant) require strictly drilled routines and procedures. It may also be necessary to prescribe work processes for underskilled or unmotivated staff in order to guarantee minimum performance of business use cases.

Define Operations

On the basis of what the business worker does in each business use-case realization, decide what operations the business worker should perform. A business worker can have one or more operations for each area of responsibility. Briefly describe each operation.

Finalize the responsibility description and explain how all operations are related, including the business worker's lifecycle. Also, describe how the business worker should prioritize among the operations.

Define Attributes

Identify and describe the attributes of the business worker based on the business worker's operations. These attributes consist of the information that the business worker requires or manages while performing its responsibilities. Attributes must not be the same as the business entities with which the business worker interacts.

Describe Competence Requirements

Describe the levels of competence that are required of the business worker (or the collection of people acting as the business worker). Competence requirements are described as skill types and indicate the required (or desired) levels of proficiency for performing the business worker's responsibilities effectively. These skill types can be compared with the actual available competencies to determine the effect on the performance of business use cases. This comparison is also important to consider when improving or redesigning business use cases. Is the difference between available and desired competencies realistic?

Analyze Relationships

Review the relationships (association, dependency, generalization) that the business worker has with other business workers, business entities, and business events. Determine whether the relationships are described properly and whether they are all really necessary to the performance of the business worker's responsibilities. Also confirm that the business worker does indeed have all the required relationships necessary to perform its responsibilities.

Evaluate Your Results

Review and discuss the business worker with other members of the team and appropriate stakeholders. Make sure that they have a clear understanding of the business worker and agree on its description.