Motivation behind this
Salesforce has announced Business Analyst certification and it is available from 11th July, 2022. The day it is available I have cleared that on same day. As business analyst is an integral role in any projects which drives me to appear for this exam. Honestly it is fairly an easy exam to pass and questions are quite straight forward.
Sharing my tips to prepare and pass this certification for trailblazers.
Exam Outline
Content: 60 multiple-choice / multiple-select questions and 5 non-scored questions.
Time allotted to complete the exam: 105 minutes
Passing score: 72%
Registration fee: USD 200 plus applicable taxes as required per local law
Delivery options: Proctored exam delivered in an online proctored environment
References: No hard-copy or online materials may be referenced during the exam
Prerequisite: Salesforce Administrator Certification
Topics
Topics | Weighting |
Customer Discovery | 17% |
Collaboration with Stakeholder | 24% |
Business Process Mapping | 16% |
Requirements | 17% |
User Stories | 18% |
User Acceptance | 8%
|
Preparation
Exam Structure
First time I found that for each question there are only 3 options and only one option to choose. As there are no multi-choice answers, so it will be less confusing on choosing the answers.
Few Important points to cover for exam
Customer Discovery
Key activities of BA
- Communication - listening, open communications
- Elicitation - understanding of project goals, what stakeholder wants
- Documenting Requirements - clear, concise
- Analyzing information - how to achieve team's business goals
- Facilitating solutions - identify options
- Implementing solutions - make sure running smoothly
- Testing - training materials to support implemented solutions
Journey Map- Better team alignment
- Strategic thinking
- Deeper understanding of customer pain points
- A stronger case of innovation
- A guide to measuring impact
Empathize your customer- Embodying - We heard your complaint, and we get it. We’ve been there.
- Shadowing - Look for patterns, Consider dominant env. dynamics, Observe entire process, Take notes, Prepare for technical issues.
- Interviewing - Stakeholder and Customer interviews
- Golden rules of shadowing & interviewing
- Get permission to record
- Keep things informal and human
- Ask open-ended questions
- Practice active listening
- Ask why
- Don't go it alone
- Cross bridge from today to tomorrow
Business Analyst Best Practices- Learn Customs of Customer
- Describe benefits of business flow diagram
- Importance of language of customer
- Recognize danger of focusing only on responsive teams
- Schedule for success
- Lead meetings that are more productive and appreciated.
- Recognize the danger of solution before knowing all requirements
- Benefits of quick win early in a project.
- Advocate for Customer
- Consider whole organization which working with a single team
- Recognize danger of taking orders without a question
- Benefits of thoroughly testing a solution
- Commit to habit of improvement
- Importance to develop testable benchmarks
- Benefits from receiving feedback
- Plan to improve own skills
Customer centric discovery- Gain insights into your customer's business challenges
- Share those insights with your customer
- Inspire & Connect, lead them to new opportunity, improve the way they work
- Know your customer
- Goals, values, Initiatives, Strategies, Obstacles
- Know who are the people
- Role they play, key principles, Challenges they face
- Be Your customer
- Empathy, Curiosity and engagement
- Identify common ground
- Develop a genuine interest in your customer's business
- Look for shared experience
- Connect with your customer
- Be sincere
- Follow your insights with an empathetic statement
- Get customer's opinion by asking open-ended questions
- Show a notable quote that your customer said before
- There levels of issues
- Level1: tactical or technical issues
- Level2: Overall business consequence
- Level3: Personal impact on their customer
- Create with your customer
- Review the challenges
- Storyboarding your vision for future
- Draft a plan
Application Lifecycle & Release Management- ChangeSet development
- Org development
- Package development
Essential BA skills- Information discovery
- Analysis & Synthesis
- Communication, Collaboration and Documentation
Explore techniques of information discovery- Who, what, where, why, how
- where to find key information
- project history
- Analysis
- Enterprise, Structural, Stakeholder
- Elicitation
- Brainstorming
- Document analysis
- Focus Groups
- Interface Analysis
- Interviews
- Observations
- Process Modelling
- Prototyping
- Requirement Workshop
- Surveys/Questionnaire
Few more in this area:
- User Adoption
- Importance of Customer 360
- Building prototyping & pitching ideas
- Write the way BA writes the requirements
Collaboration with Stakeholders
Scrum & Kanban- Scrum Values
- Focus
- Courage
- Openness
- Commitment
- Respect
- Roles of Scrum master, product owner, the Team, SME, TPMs, Functional Manager
- Kanban
- Visualize workflow
- Limit WIP
- Incremental and evolutionary change
- Kanban includes metrics
- Use Kanban if it’s necessary to change directions often, minimize disruptions to a plan, and start the urgent work quickly.
- Use Scrum if you’re managing a large planned project, your team can commit to a 2-week chunk of work, and the stakeholder can wait until the end of the sprint for the team to start the work.
Develop Trust
- Create a personal connection
- Be transparent and truthful
- Act on feedback
- Own up to your mistakes
- Be Consistent
Influencing Styles (which style to use)
- Collaborative
- Assertive
- Analytical
- Accommodative
- Inspiring
Respond to people with empathy
- Sympathy - includes emotion
- Empathy - other person’s perspective and emotions, communicates these back to them, and withholds judgement
Develop skilled Relationships
- Accept and celebrate a diverse workplace
- Develop active listening skills
- Expand other communication skills
- Take time to support those you lead
- Manage technology and anticipate its impact
- Share your wisdom and invite the wisdom of others
- Develop honesty and trust
Content Strategy
- Craft Ursa Major’s content vision and get buy-in from stakeholders.
- Learn about customers and map their end-to-end journey.
- Evaluate existing content to identify gaps and opportunities.
- Define, pilot, and evangelize the strategy.
- Clear your mind
- Design the right message
- Eliminate buzzwords
- Plan your words and images
- Practice with a layperson
How to maximize audience engagement- Pause throughout
- Tee up with teammates
- Confirm with your audience
- Ask follow-up questions
- Create a “parking lot"
Process Mapping
- Make understanding and communicating the process much easier among teams, stakeholders, or customers.
- Help identify flaws in the process and where improvements should be made.
- UPN (universal process notation) is a simple way to document processes
Best practices of process mapping:
- Apply business process mapping to the right types of processes
- Be clear about the focus of your process mapping
- Get someone skilled to map your processes
- Validate your maps
- Don’t fix your processes until they are fully mapped
- Build the right team
- Keep it simple
- Work with your stakeholders
How to build your Salesforce journey
Business Process Mapping
Focus on User Experience
- Design Process
- Empathize
- Define
- Ideate
- Prototype and test
- Define project scope and Requirements
- Personas
- Jobs to be done
- Constraints
- Stakeholders
- UX Artifacts
- Journey Map
- Service Blueprint
- Ecosystem map
- Empathy map
- Mental map
- Storyboard
- Screens and prototypes
Governance basics
Why?
- Compliance
- Risk assessment
- Cost efficiencies
- Velocity
Few other indicative areas as follows:
- How to construct a user story
- As a < who >, I want < what > so that < why >.
- Change Management
- Setup Audit Trail and usefulness
- Version Controlling through GitHub
- Different types of testing
- BA role during UAT
- Which sandbox is useful in what types of testing
- Suggestions of UAT of LDV (Large Data Volume)
- Volume
- Average vs peak performance
- Load simulation pattern
- Actual production data vs test data
- Timings of test
Documentation Flow
That's all I can remember and thanks for reading!
Further Reading for other certifications
