The Event Model looks at the scope of your project as if this business function is being outsourced to a third party business and your Executive Sponsor is the CEO of that business. This is the new way of thinking about requirements that I referred to in the Overview post.

The Event Model consists of the following elements:

• The Context Diagram – shows your business boundary as a circle in the center of the diagram with your suppliers, customers and information flows surrounding the center circle. I will present this in detail in the next post.
• The Event/Response Model – this contains the detail of the events that “wake up your business” and requires the business to have a planned response. It is progressively elaborated in conjunction with the Context Diagram. More on this in a future post.
• Use Cases – are derived from the Event/Response Model and show the specific steps required for each business response. At the end of the requirements analysis, this becomes (or is the basis for) your “Business Standard Operating Procedures Manual”. Functional Requirements are derived from the Use Cases.

An important thing to remember when creating the Event Model is to keep it independent of technology. It needs to address “what we do” and not “how we do it”. Doing this will help you envision more design alternatives than you would if you locked in a solution at the requirements level.

In the next post I will give you a closer look at how to create a Context Diagram and utilize it to get the requirements discovery rolling.