Blueprint Enterprise

Blueprint is about managing and collaborating on requirements. It is primarily designed as an enterprise level solution that supports mixed portfolios of projects that employ a range of methodologies from waterfall to agile. In particular, it is a tool to assist in the adoption of agile development across an entire company, and in these instances the requirements are used to generate user stories. Storyteller primarily assists in the creation of these user stories.

Although Blueprint and Storyteller are most commonly deployed together as part of Blueprint Enterprise, they can be used individually. In this case, you are left with either a sophisticated requirements management tool (if you are using Blueprint) or a tool for generating user stories (if using Storyteller).

Blueprint is marketed both through a direct sales model and in conjunction with strategic alliance partners across the globe, which include TATA, Cognizant, NTT DATA, and Capgemini.

Blueprint’s products are suitable for use by virtually any company in which IT projects form an important part of the business. However, since new management came into the company three years ago, Blueprint has increasingly focused on the largest and most complex environments.  

Blueprint boasts a large customer base among the world’s leading enterprises and, in particular, nearly half the Fortune 100 organisations use Blueprint. Blueprint’s customer list includes companies from a wide variety of industries such as MetLife, Coca-Cola and Nike.

Storyteller uses model-based requirements design that makes requirements easy to create, comprehend and maintain. Sub-models are supported to allow for reuse and to prevent process diagrams from becoming cluttered. The navigation path means that it’s easy to figure out what you’re viewing, even in a large project. You can switch between business processes and user system processes so that business users can access requirements models without being overwhelmed while allowing testers and designers to get the information they need.

Automatic generation of user stories from requirements saves time while ensuring that all the user stories in your system will be consistent, conforming to the same style and standard. Reuse of business rules and non-functional requirements (NFRs) means that the same rules can be used throughout all of your projects, further enforcing high quality and consistency.

Using pre-packaged libraries of regulations and standards available in content accelerators ensures business applications are in compliance and reduces the time and effort associated with self-attestation and audit.  Additional accelerators are available to support best practices, including one containing over two-thousand elicitation questions for NFRs.

Blueprint makes building a conversation around a requirement or set of requirements easy, fast and convenient. These conversations can be fully synchronized with external tools, so if some employees already communicate in, say, CA Rally, they can continue to do so, and their conversations will still show up in Blueprint. Likewise, Blueprint is built to ensure traceability. Every conversation had, and every decision made, is saved by Blueprint to the requirement in question, making a complete audit trail available for every decision, every requirement, every business rule and every NFR: in short, for everything.

The relationship between requirements is readily available to view, as is the impact of any changes made to a requirement, via the Impact Analysis tool. This provides a neat, visual way of seeing exactly what will be affected by any given change.

Blueprint provides extensive consulting services for clients, primarily focused on finding the best way to integrate Blueprint with your environment. The company also provides training (both e-learning and in-class), support and the Blueprint Community web forum.