Case Studies

Health care administration trust in Seattle, Washington

Active Solutions Northwest used software engineering principles to make a difference in at this Trust, which administers health and retirement benefits for union members in Western Washington:
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Situation:

When the IS Manager of the organization wanted to document its business processes using object-oriented systems analysis, he called on Active Solutions.

Strategies:

Active Solutions' consultant met with the IS Manager to brainstorm the best approach.

The methodology that was adopted is a blend of traditional systems analysis and data modelling with some elements of the Unified Modelling Language (UML).  The goals were to:

• Describe the business processes without using techological terminology
• Create documents that would be as much as possible in the terminology of the staff who perform the work of the departments 
• Provide a clear set of requirements for both enhancing the existing computer system and for supporting the selection of commercial off-the-shelf software to meet the departments' needs

Approach:  

For each of five departments, Active Solutions' consultant met with the departmental manager or supervisor to gain an overview of the business processes of that department, then with each member of the departmental team to take notes on their work in detail, soliciting "wish list" items for possible future improvements.

The existing legacy-system programs and data, existing forms and reports, governing trust documents and applicable regulations  were examined and incorporated into the resulting documents:

• A system overview narrative.
• A scenario diagram depicting the scope of the system and external actors such as other departments and systems, customers, vendors, etc.  This diagram is based on UML Use Case Diagram concepts.
• Scenario Narratives, very similar to Use Case descriptions in the UML.
• Process Flow diagrams, visually depicting all the possible scenarios described in the Scenario Narratives.
• A traditional Entity Relationship Diagram depicting data entities for the department, and their relationships.
• A Data Model describing the specific data attributes for each data entity, indentifying primary and foreign keys, and depicting those attributes that currently existed in the legacy computing system, distinct from those that existed only on paper forms.
• A State Transition Diagram identifying meaningful state transitions for entities with their triggering events or monitoring processes.  This diagram, with its accompanying narrative document, ties together the dynamic models (System Overview, Scenario Diagram, Scenario Narratives, and Process Flows) and the static (data) model.  This approach has its origins in the DMR Group's DMR-P process first piloted in 1996 - 1997 while our chief consultant was on staff with a major Seattle aerospace company as a system architect.
• A Requirements document stating the requirements that an automated system must meet in order to implement the business processes described in the documents listed above.
• A Glossary.
• A Definition of Terms.

These documents were reviewed individually by the departmental staff and management and as they made changes and clarifications, these were incorporated into the documents.

After a final review by all appropriate departmental staff, the documents were published and distributed to each manager in the organization and to the Information Systems staff.

Reception by Staff

As was seen earlier at the aerospace company, the resulting documents were very understandable by line-of-business staff (end users) while providing very useful insights to line and upper-level management and to the Information Systems support organization.

Results:

The documents have been used by the organization to present their requirements to software vendors in requesting proposals for a new system to replace the legacy system, and to evaluate the proposals to determine their 'fit' with the organizations business processes.

Later, the documentation proved useful in defining configuration and workflow rules and in planning and executing data conversions from the legacy system to the newly acquired system(s).

Comments by one vendor:

"We were all very impressed with the work you did at (the trust)."