The Importance of Models

We put a great deal of emphasis on creating models during our engagements. Here’s why. If you’ve ever been involved in a building project and ended up with the solution you wanted, it’s undoubtedly because you stayed involved and, through architectural drawings, you had a way to communicate your vision to the builders.

We believe that models serve the same purpose in the world of business process understanding, of software requirements gathering, and of development. How a business process works, where there are handoffs or problems or delays, where there may be risks, where system support is needed, or where there might be opportunities for improvement – all of these can be captured more effectively in models than in words. In software development, the OMG has sanctioned a model-driven approach and recommends focusing effort on the development of models . This focus allows the intellectual investment to be preserved, the design to be better understood and communicated, and an overall architecture managed.

Some key points:

• Drawing models together with subject matter experts is an effective way to elicit – and document – a great deal of information in a relatively short amount of time.

• Reviewing models is more effective than reviewing text – when you “walk” a business process or a system process using the pictures, inaccuracies leap out.

• Models help you focus on problem areas in the “as-is” world more quickly. You can easily spot unnecessary handoffs, circular processing, and delays.

• Models can be annotated with symbols to represent opportunities, or risk areas, or metrics, or timing.

All that being said, models without words behind them are not valuable over the long term. The words allow you to describe steps in detail, to provide timing information, to indicate which business rules apply and when; in short, they complete the picture. The models and their accompanying descriptions provide powerful deliverables to guide the solutions you envision.