Business Analysts play a vital role in the project development. They not only analyze the business and trends but also contribute much to developing applications. Business Analysts travel throughout the SDLC cycle, right from analyzing the current business of clients to consulting solutions to delivering the apt product and training them to use the application. To be a successful Salesforce Business Analyst, here are a few best practices suggestions.
Role and Responsibilities of Salesforce BA
Before we get to know some best practices, let’s understand the responsibilities of a
Salesforce Business Analyst.
- Analyzing the current business trends of the stakeholders: Salesforce BA connects with the stakeholders, learns their business, understands the pain points, and explores how to overcome them efficiently using Salesforce.
- Gathering Requirements: While identifying and analyzing the business process of stakeholders, Salesforce BA can identify their requirements. After getting them from the stakeholders, BAs translate them into steps that lead to developing an efficient Salesforce solution.
- Configuring Salesforce Solutions: Salesforce Business Analysts are also responsible for configuring Salesforce solutions such as creating profiles and users, creating and assigning permission sets, creating approval processes, creating reports and dashboards, installing/upgrading packages, and deploying the application.
- Providing End-user Training and Support: Once the project development is done, Salesforce BA connects with the users of the developed application and provides training on how to use the product fruitfully to meet the business requirements. Even during the Hypercare phase, the role of the Business Analyst is quite crucial to support the stakeholders to use the application smoothly.
- Project Documentation: Business Analysts prepare and maintain project documents such as user stories, business process flows, configuration sheets, test scripts, end-user training documents, functional specifications, and design documents.
- Connecting with Stakeholders: This is the important responsibility of a Salesforce Business Analyst. BAs regularly connect with the stakeholders to clarify things, update the progress, and inform and gather important details that keep both parties aligned with the development process.
Salesforce Business Analyst Best Practices
Lets learn about Salesforce Business Analyst Best Practices.
1. Communication
Since the Salesforce Business Analyst has to interact a lot with the stakeholders and cross-functional teams, communication skills are very important. Effective communication skills are essential for a Salesforce Business Analyst to successfully convey ideas and thoughts to stakeholders and team members, ultimately propelling their career forward and ensuring long-term success. While communicating, remember to speak/write professionally and politely. While emailing, follow a standard template and professional language. During a conversation, ensure that the opposite party is clear with your speaking by asking questions like, “Could you please confirm if my point is clear? “, “Are you able to follow the logic behind my suggestion?” or “Is there anything you would like to clarify or discuss further?”. As a Salesforce BA, when you feel the message is more complicated to explain, try using a whiteboard and marker or presentation slides to convey it. It is a plus to have a good presentation skill for a Salesforce BA as they’ll be presenting quite a lot of times throughout their career.
2. Meetings Management
Throughout the Salesforce BA career life, there will be a lot of meetings to be held. It can be with the stakeholders, cross-functional teams, or higher officials of the organization. Preparation for the meetings is required to conduct it smoothly. Organize the agenda so that the takeaway from that meeting is clear for the audience. During meetings, ensure that the information provided is productive. Prepare a presentation using a standard format for meetings and speak only about the topics that are planned for a particular session. Inform about the meeting schedule and its purpose at least 4 to 5 days prior so that the stakeholders/team members have enough time to adjust their schedule and get ready for the meeting.
3. Understanding the Business
To provide quality Salesforce applications, a Salesforce BA should have a good understanding of the current business process. One of the best ways to deeply understand the business is to create a business process flow. Breaking down the entire business process into step-by-step procedures helps in identifying requirements and improvements. Learning to use tools to create business process flow helps enhance career growth by equipping Salesforce BAs with the skills to map, analyze, and optimize business processes efficiently.
4. Requirement Analysis
While gathering requirements from the stakeholders, pay attention to details about their business process. Though they explicitly provide developers with their requirements, there might be some hidden problems that might not be noticed by the stakeholders. But as a Salesforce Business Analyst, the job is to pay attention to them and bring them into discussion to avoid inefficiency in the application.
A Salesforce BA doesn’t need to accept all the needs of the stakeholders as such. The ability to recommend Salesforce features and services according to client’s needs and effectively persuade them to use the resources wisely is one of the most essential qualities of a Salesforce BA.
For instance, the client is a company that builds mobile phone towers. They categorize the towers they build into two: Greenfield (on the ground) and Rooftop (on a building). They require to store data about the building height only if the tower category is Rooftop, otherwise, the building height is ‘NIL’. Since the client is storing data in Excel sheets and doesn’t have knowledge about Salesforce features, they are insisting the developer have it as an alpha- numeric text field to enter the building height. As a Salesforce BA, suggest and convince the client to have either of the following solutions to improve the suboptimal requirements:
- To have the building height field of Number datatype and let them enter the height as 0 for the Greenfield category.
- To set visibility for the building height field as ‘only visible when tower category is Rooftop’.
Such kind of recommendations showcase the ability to understand the needs of the clients and identify optimal solutions before providing Salesforce solutions. Suggestions should focus on developing a user-friendly solution that meets the requirements of the end-users.
5. Change Management
Salesforce Business Analyst should be proactive in informing stakeholders about any change in the scope of the project, requirements, or project/meeting schedule and ensure that everyone is informed and aligned. Adapting to changes is an essential skill required for a successful Salesforce BA.
6. Effective Project Documentation
Learning to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint helps in documenting all the project documentation. A clear understanding of the requirements and the solution built is required to effectively document all the important details. Use professional and unambiguous language while documenting. Documentation should be organized, clear, and comprehensive, including all necessary information that may be required for future application expansion. The usage of the standard template is mandatory. Practice naming the files using version numbers to differentiate different stages of the documentation. Use collaboration tools like Google Drive or SharePoint for collaborative works.
7. Commitment to Continuous Learning
As a Salesforce Business Analyst, it is required to keep updated on the latest features and upgrades in Salesforce. It will help to provide quality Salesforce solutions.
Conclusion
In this article, we learnt a few general best practices for Salesforce BA to follow to excel in their career. Mastering the role of a Salesforce Business Analyst requires a blend of technical proficiency, effective communication, strategic thinking, and a user-centric approach. Committing to these best practices not only ensures immediate project success but also paves the way for sustained career growth and long-term success in the dynamic field of Salesforce.