Building Alliances for Change

Tipping Hats 

Hat stackers. Perhaps, you know one, you've been one, or you are one. As a business analyst or architect, wearing multiple hats in a smaller organization using Salesforce seems like part of the job. Yet, it's a delicate balancing act before toppling over. What do you do to find the right balance and create organizational change?

Recently, I gave a presentation at the Salesforce BA Summit. I pointed out that a "hat stacker" taking on multiple roles should not do everything themselves. Even if s/he performs all their roles well, it's not sustainable in a growing organization. One person doing everything cannot scale.

Business analysts and architects need to build a strong network of alliances around them to manage different tasks and issues that arise throughout the discovery and development process. Each alliance serves a purpose and allows business analysts and architects to balance their “hats" without dropping any. 

Opening the Door 

Bonny Hinners, Principal Customer Success Architect at Salesforce, and Doina Popa, Founder, and CEO of InnoTrue, recently published an article, Correspondences: Establishing Credibility. Bonny states in the article: 

Having a network of supporters who are willing to vouch for our expertise helps to get the door open in the first place. Especially when we work with new organizations or teams, a sponsor can help us get in front of leadership and on the CEO's calendar and can help us go in with the best presentation for our new audience so our passion is not wasted on misguided efforts or an audience unprepared to listen.

The best business analysts and architects develop alliances with key stakeholders before developing a solution. Initially, these relationships give the business analyst or architect access to executives or other stakeholders, as Bonny points out above, and increase stakeholder engagement. Over time, the alliances ensure the solution achieves the client's business goals and improves its business. 

Building Internal Allies 

The project sponsor or the department's director/manager most impacted by the intended solution can make excellent internal allies for a business analyst or architect. They provide detailed insight into the change's impact on the company's business with the business analyst or architect on the development team. Also, they have the necessary understanding and authority to resolve client stakeholder conflicts if needed. 

At Coca-Cola, I worked with a program manager in Global Hospitality. She had operational responsibilities, along with a mandate to continuously improve their processes. We regularly collaborated, developing a trust that minimized verification of what she needed or what I was doing. Over the years, we improved processes at an accelerating rate, enabling managers to focus more on managing tickets and hotel rooms, and less on chasing down information. This resulted in a better experience for the managers as well as for the guests.

Growing Alliances

When discovering client needs, business analysts and architects often meet subject matter experts - each a specialist in a particular business aspect. Business analysts and architects typically have questions about each subject matter expert's processes. If documentation exists for the processes, it may assume expertise a business analyst or architect doesn't have. A relationship with the subject matter expert fills the gaps.

I have heard of cases where a business department "goes rogue," hiring an outside firm to develop a solution without involving its Information Technology (IT) department. The department manager usually justifies this by saying IT is not responsive or too slow (backlogged). Good business analysts and architects convince the manager to form a relationship with IT, with the business analyst or architect acting as a liaison to IT. Even cloud-based solutions eventually need some resource from IT, like access to a data source.

It Takes a Team

While a business analyst or architect can wear many hats, it takes a team to succeed. Building a strong set of alliances, like those summarized in the table below, helps them effectively create change within an organization. 

Alliance	Support
Project sponsor or departmental manager	Focal point for coordination Provides access to busy stakeholders Resolves client conflicts Deals with business issues outside of scope
Subject matter experts	Provide insight into specific processes Fill gaps in understanding
Information Technology	Shares technical realities and customer constraints, such as security

Alliances enable "hat stackers" to take on multiple roles without doing everything themselves and create change within organizations.