Process Flows – Understanding Business Requirements

In this chapter, we will explore and understand documented requirements and process flows. Only after a good understanding of business requirements and process steps can we confidently move to the next step to determine if a process step can be a potential candidate for automation. So, this chapter and the next chapter solely focus on aspects around understanding requirements and process flow steps.

We will assume that requirements are accurately captured and prioritized and that process flows are effectively developed. You can find details on these topics in Chapters 1 and 2 of The Salesforce Business Analyst Handbook. In the event that your implementation of requirements and/or process flows is not clearly understood by all, make sure to clarify this before even thinking about automating your business processes.

Our focus in this book is to automate business processes, and this can be best done by first understanding...

Types of business requirements

As an analyst on the project, our goal is to completely understand the full scope and intent of the business needs. By understanding different types of requirements, you will be able to manage the requirements process effectively at all project stages. Remind yourself that we are here to understand the requirements and end-to-end steps for the process so that we get to know the real problem or hidden opportunity and not to provide our opinions or solutions on what to or what not to automate. To understand this in greater detail, take a look at the Identifying requirements section of The Salesforce Business Analyst Handbook.

Let’s look at the four main types of software requirements:

• Business requirements: These requirements describe the high-level functionality that the business needs. All stakeholders and anyone even remotely associated with the project should know and understand business requirements. The main purpose of the project...

Use-case scenario 1 – Partner user onboarding process

In this first scenario, I will walk you through the Partner Relationship Management (PRM) partner user onboarding process. The flow is for a partner user to request access and be able to get access to your Salesforce PRM system and access channel sales functionality.

Note

PRM – aka channel sales – is a tool that helps companies/organizations manage their partners. PRM helps manage relationships and interactions between your sales team and your partners—retailers, distributors, systems integrators, referral partners, managed service providers (MSPs), and so on.

Before this project, the registration process was performed in multiple systems, including many manual processes. The business requirements are to enable PRM for partner users in Salesforce in a multi-release roadmap.

Let us look at some business requirements (partner registration) at a high level. During the initial CRP session, we...

Tips for success

• Get to know the project stakeholders, SMEs, and project team members. You can get info from organization charts and social profiles.
• If you are a business analyst, you will probably be facilitating and documenting these requirements and process flows. If you are not, make sure you are involved during these discussions.
• Make sure to encourage everyone to contribute and ask questions. This will help everyone on the team. This includes you too.
• Send minutes of the meeting by the end of the day to all participants. Follow up as needed till you and the stakeholders understand and agree to high-level requirements.
• Do not get into designing solutions. Understand the business requirements and process flows. Remember – you do not yet know what requirements will be in scope. Your goal should be to gain a good understanding of the complete situation and not provide options or solutions.
• Approach the project with a design-thinking mindset. Look...

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed ways to identify the right project participants and then checked which tools and techniques there are to help us understand the business requirements. You now understand the importance of business process flows for common understanding by the entire project team with simplified real-world scenarios. We ended the chapter with a few tips for success.

In the next chapter, we discuss functional requirements and see if they make a good case for automation. We will look at an example functional specification document (FSD) with a few real-world scenarios.

Questions

1. What do we capture in a process flow and what is an “as-is” process flow?
2. Do all project team members need to understand business requirements? Why?
3. Name a few tools that you can use to create business process flows.
4. What is a RACI matrix?

Further reading

• Srini Munagavalasa. The Salesforce Business Analyst Handbook, Part 1: Planning and Analysis. Packt Publishing Ltd (2022).
• IIBA. A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge. Lightning Source Inc (2015).