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Chapter 4
basic events needed to measure process performance—stakeholders will not be
satisfied until you have modeled at least some of these events.
Add rollup (RU)
dimensions next to
their base
dimensions and tick
all the events that
can be rolled up to
their level
Figure 4-14 shows another new event: SALES TARGETS. It is not part of the order
or customer support processes, hence no indentation, but stakeholders believe that
sales targets drive orders so they have placed the event before CUSTOMER
ORDERS in time/value sequence. From its main clause “Salesperson has product
type target” it is immediately obvious that it should take advantage of the con-
formed role-playing EMPLOYEE dimension. But it cannot reuse the conformed
PRODUCT dimension because stakeholders have stated that targets are set for
product types not for individual products. The good news is that the event can still
be conformed with PRODUCT at the product type level because this is a con-
formed PRODUCT attribute. You record this by adding a rollup dimension
PRODUCT TYPE [RU] (immediately to the right of PRODUCT, if possible, to
denote that it is derived from it) and ticking it for each PRODUCT-related event to
denote that they can be compared to SALES TARGETS at the PRODUCT TYPE
level. There is no need to model the rollup any further, at the moment, because it
will not contain any new attributes, just PRODUCT TYPE and any other con-
formed product attributes above it in the product hierarchy, such as
SUBCATEGORY and CATEGORY already defined in PRODUCT.
Using the Matrix to Find Missing Event Details
Use your final set of
dimensions to
recheck events for
missing details
Once you have added all the events that the stakeholders are currently interested in
(or as many as time permits), it is well worth making one more quick pass of each
event, now that you have built up a collection of potential conformed dimensions,
to see if you can get any more reuse from them. For each event, point at each
dimension it doesn’t reference and ask:
Why isn’t this dimension a detail of this event?
Simply pointing at each empty cell in turn like this takes full advantage of the
physical proximity of all the events and dimensions on the same spreadsheet or
whiteboard that the matrix provides and can often jolt someone into spotting a
valuable missing conformed detail at the last minute.
Playing the Event Rating Game
Ask stakeholders to
rate the importance
of each event
You now need the stakeholders help to decide which event(s) to implement in your
next release. To do this add an extra column to the matrix (as in Figure 4-15) to
record event importance and ask the stakeholders to rate each event based on a few
simple rules: