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Introduction
A business analyst is an important member of the Provisio team. The BA is introduced on the kickoff and is most involved at the beginning of the project. The BA works closely with the client to collect requirements. By facilitating what we call discovery sessions you’ll dive deep into the client’s processes, procedures and requirements. These will be written up in what are called user stories.
These user stories allow the client to verify that we’ve accurately collected all of their requirements, and allows the solution architect to get an understanding of what the client wants Salesforce to do. This helps them write up their solution or design.
Tasks of the BA
The BA might be involved in several other tasks beyond writing up user stories. These can include:
- Working with the solution architect to understand why a user story exists, so they can make sure they write the best solution
- Writing User Acceptance Testing (UAT) scripts
- Testing UAT scripts that someone else has written
- Testing configured functionality either in a sandbox or production to make sure it works
The BA is a core team member and can be called upon to help with any task that benefits from understanding what the client needs, but that doesn’t rely on needing to build things in Salesforce.
What Makes a Good Business Analyst?
Being a good Business Analyst involves strong communication skills, excellent note taking, staying organized and being able to break technical concepts down into things that non-technical staff members can understand.
If you’re interested in becoming a business analyst, you can practice writing user stories for projects that you’ve worked on in your personal life and developing good summarization and “read back” skills, being able to hear something from someone and express it back to them so that they know you’ve understood.
I was involved in some software implementations on the client side before I moved to being a BA on the implementation side. You don’t need strong Salesforce knowledge when you start, because the BA is supposed to write “platform-agnostic” user stories.
Salesforce also has a Business Analyst certification, launched in 2022. I found it an enjoyable certification.
Conclusion
Hope this helps you learn more about what makes a good Salesforce Business Analyst.