Business Analyst Best Practices

Learn the Customs of Your Customer

• Business Analyst skills are found in a variety of rolls, included those of admins who are responsible for adding functionality to a Salesforce instance.
• When called upon to improve a business process, biggest challenge is to understand the current state and why there’s a need for improvement.
  • One of the best way to get a deep understanding of current state is to create a business process map
  • Business process map: visual representation of every step and decision made to complete a process from start to finish
  • Universal process notation (UPN) is a simple way to document processes
    • Example showing top level lead-to-cash process with all activities, handoffs, people, and systems shown below.
    • Possible to drill down into the detail

• Okay to start with incomplete rough draft of process flow diagram.
  • Need to meet with the actual works who go through every step during their regular jobs to flesh it out and fill in gaps.
  • Filling out the diagram is often a good source of information about what causes frustrations, inefficiencies, and pain.
• Once all detail has been collected, take the time to create a polished version.
  • The initial state is part of your documentation.
  • Also serves as a starting point when eliciting business requirements
  • Having a “before and after” set of process flow diagrams can help illustrate how things have improved over the course of the project.
• Learning the customer’s language is important - use it when you document business requirements.
• When working with the customer, some people are likely to be very responsive and reach out often. Others may be more busy and unavailable.
  • Danger is those who are easiest to work with may not be the ones who can help with the most important priorities.
  • Need to put in extra effort to follow up with those who have the info you need.
• In summary, connect with the right people, use the right language, and use visual tools.
  
  
• Business process flow diagram is meant to represent the detailed steps of the current business process.
• One trap to avoid is spending too much time engaging with the most responsive team - their tasks may not be the highest priority.

Schedule for Success

• Business analysts hold a lot of meetings, and busy people generally don’t look forward to more meetings
• Meaningful Meetings
  • Most people appreciate meetings that are productive, so job as a business analyst is to make meetings as meaningful as possible
  • Most important part of a good meeting is the agenda, which should be provided before the meeting starts
    • Best medium for an agenda is a “slide presentation”
    • Agenda tells people what you hope to accomplish with their time,and sets expectations for your time
    • Helps people show up prepared, so they have questions and comments and are ready to participate
    • If things go off track, you can return to the agenda to restore order
    • Meetings also:
      • Makes you look prepared and in control
      • Provides structure for the meeting
      • Acts a signpost - people know where you are in the meeting
      • Gives people something visual to focus on, which can help retain attention
  • Record meetings, if possible, so you are less reliant on notes
  • Near end of the meeting, recap what was covered and summarize what was gained from everyone’s time together
    • Identify who’s responsible for next steps, and if anything from the agenda needs to be revisited again
• Understand, then solution
  • Need to finish understanding a problem before you begin to solve it. For business analysts, this means gathering all requirements before solutioning.
  • Watch out for two scenarios:
    • Preemptive solution - A stakeholder comes to your initial meeting already bearing a solution.
      • For example: they’ve seen a product demo and want to use it in the business.
      • Try to help stakeholders think about what they want to accomplish or do differently in generic terms
      • Focus on “Why,” not on “How”
    • Admin with a new set of skills wants to start tinkering with the platform, so they forget to do their due diligence and solidify the business requirements before building.
• Build Trust while Building a Solution
  • Eventually, you will have your requirements in order, and a place for a solution, and you can start building.
  • Demonstrating that you can deliver a good part of the solution early on in the project has a lot of benefits.
    • Shows that there’s a good reason to engage with you.
    • Builds momentum for the overall project, getting buy-in from other teams
      
      
• In summary, a little strategic timing in producing, waiting for the right time to solution, and running meetings professionally will help ensure project is successful
  
  
• Tools that help keep meetings on track: a slide presentation, an agenda.
• Sequencing your deliverable strategically help the project because an early quick win can develop trust and buy-in from the customer.

Advocate for the Customer

• Be on the Lookout
  • As a business analyst you’re more knowledgeable about a customer’s processes than most people outside their organization
    • Step in when you see something happening that might not be in their best interest
    • Sometimes the customer is their own worst enemy - be on the lookout for this as well
• Consider the whole organization
  • Customers tend to start projects that focus on one area of their business, often because that is where they can invest and get the greatest return
    • Trouble is they’ll treat one unit of the business as though it’s the only one that exists, but one project for the first team can greatly impact other teams
  • As a customer advocate, always be considering the larger organization. You might find they have some common business needs and you can plan accordingly.
  • You may find teams have conflicting requirements or priorities - get a decision before moving ahead.
• Dig deeper
  • Always ask why something is done a certain way, don’t just follow orders without question
  • Even if a customer is adamant about doing things a certain way, make them explain. You need to know the “why” and make sure there isn’t any danger lurking behind the request.
  • When its time to start developing solutions, make the effort to investigate different ways to solve a given problem
    • Often there’s more than one viable solution, each with their own pros and cons
    • Don’t develop solutions in a vacuum, bring the customer a choice of solutions so you can discuss which one will best suit their needs
• Test Like you Mean it
  • Do a thorough job of testing the solution before it’s released to the general public.
    • To be a good tester, you need to be creative. Don’t just test the ideal, expected path that everyone would follow in a perfect world.
  • Find volunteers who are willing a try the solution without any guidance, then, just watch what they do. Anything they struggle with is an opportunity to improve the solution or plan for it during training.
  • Test related functionality that should not have changed. Interconnected systems sometimes result in something else being out of place.
    
    
• Risk of including one business unit in the discussions for your first project: you might miss opportunities to meet common business needs.
• The expedient, immediately-obvious solution is not always the right solution. Do not just save time, try to make the right decisions.

Commit to the Habit of Improvement

• Reflect and Improve
  • No one is perfect on their first try at anything.
  • There’s a huge return on investment in taking the time to seek feedback and expand your knowledge for the sake of your next project and for your own career.
• Measure Success
  • One of the first conversations you have with a customer is to discuss why they want to change how they do business
    • Establish some benchmarks to test what the customer cares about
      • Minutes for a sales rep to make a quote and email it to their customer
      • How often service agents needs to make a return visit after installing a home appliance
    • Run benchmarks on the existing process
      • Make sure tests produce something reliably quantifiable
      • After solution is improved, run the benchmarks again
    • Customers want to know how much things have improved because it’s how they calculate their return on investment
      • If you delivered significant improvements in your deliverables, the customer is likely to want you to keep working on their behalf
• Seek Feedback
  • Over the course of a project, you will produce a lot of materials: documentation, presentations, solutions, test cases
  • Whenever possible, ask for feedback on the documents
• Expand Your Knowledge
  • Learning from Trailhead and other resources should be a lifelong habit
  • If you have an opportunity to observe a project happening in real time, take it
  • Watch how seasoned professionals manage their BA duties
  • Try to attend post-mortem meetings held at the end of a project
  • Attend user group meetings to hear how things are going, and what they would have done differently
    
    
• Run benchmarks on the existing business processes in order to gather a baseline set of data to compare with later