Universal Process Notation (UPN) has become a must-have skill for Salesforce Business Analysts in the Salesforce ecosystem. The Get Started as a Salesforce Business Analyst trail heavily features UPN as the recommended approach to discovering and visualizing information.
But why has it become such an essential tool in the business analyst’s toolkit?
LO1-1 Understand Why do I need to engage in business analysis?
LO1-2 Consider What is the value of business analysis?
The ultimate purpose of the business analysis is to discover and understand the business process, i.e. the sequence of activities required to achieve a particular business objective. Drawing a visual picture of those steps is not only useful, in many cases it is even the only sensible course of action to get a thorough comprehension of the problem.
You are already familiar with this. Salesforce flows are built using a visual diagram because it is much, much easier to understand, follow and build a complex logic when you can see all the loops, parallel paths or scenarios. A linear document makes it hard to appreciate that complexity.
Good business analysts work on discovering and understanding how different business processes interact and depend on each other.
The Sales team has asked you to introduce new record types on the Account object (e.g. “A”, “B” and “C”) and change which fields are available on different types. It might be tempting, having received a very detailed request and specification from the business stakeholders, to get right into implementing it. However, there are many things such a request does not address.
Things to consider for the sales team:
Assuming all those questions (and any others) are answered and indeed the request does make sense, it is not yet the time to start implementing it.
Other business processes to consider:
By engaging in visual analysis before architecting a solution you will:
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Click “Next Module” to move on to Module 2, to find out “Why you need UPN?”