Elements Academy Highlights
What is Elements Academy?
Elements.cloud launched Elements Academy in March 2021, offering free education to people in these Salesforce development roles:
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The Academy offers a collection of courses for each role. Topics cover the entire software development lifecycle, from Capturing requirements and generating user stories to Org health and impact analysis. (Course names are shown in italics)
This article highlights the following courses in the business analyst and architect course collections:
Capturing requirements and generating user stories
Business process mapping
Data modeling
Capturing requirements and generating user stories uses process maps and data models extensively, so the Academy recommends taking the Business process mapping and Data modeling courses as prerequisites.
Good Business Analysis and Solution Design Benefits
The Business process mapping course leads off with a definition of business analysis and why it’s crucial for strong architecture. Business analysis improves understanding of:
Technical requirements to plan and configure Salesforce correctly
How Salesforce integrates with third-party apps
Where business operations can change to improve architectural design
The course shows some specific benefits of process mapping including, “Engaged stakeholders lead to better feedback.” Better stakeholder feedback enriches the understanding of what a business needs, resulting in a solution better fulfilling the requirements.
Realizing the Benefits
Business process mapping introduces universal process notation (UPN), used by the Elements platform to build process maps. UPN is a simple yet powerful way to show process flow to stakeholders. The simplicity comes from connecting activity boxes with arrows labeled to show the activity’s input and output.
UPN’s power comes from connecting any activity to a child diagram showing detailed steps of that activity. A process map can contain a hierarchy of diagrams, enabling stakeholders to drill down into more detailed activities until (ideally) no ambiguity is left.
As the saying goes, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Creating a meaningful process map requires considerable thought. Business process mapping provides five UPN principles and a list of six essential questions to help think through what goes where in a process map.
Poor Business Analysis and Solution Design Risks
A business analyst or architect who doesn’t verify his or her understanding of requirements risks introducing defects into a solution design. An architect neglecting to validate a solution with users increases that risk.
Elements Academy Capturing requirements and generating user stories course shows some costs of putting a defective solution into production:
Lost employee productivity – Cost of wasted time multiplied by the number of affected users
Process delays while recovering from the defect
Lost user trust from a failing system
The course quotes a 2010 study by the IBM System Science Institute, which found the cost of fixing defects in production is 100 times more expensive to the business than addressing it at the design stage. That’s a huge opportunity cost - development time and effort that could have improved the solution or even created a new one.
Even worse than a defective solution is an unused solution that doesn’t fit the business requirements. Capturing requirements and generating user stories says:
You can just as easily waste development time and effort building solutions that actually work – just do not bring any value to the end-users. If you do not understand the stakeholders’ needs and do not focus on discovering them at the design stage, you risk wasting time building features that will never be adopted.
Anyone who has suffered through failure to adopt a solution or a defective solution in production realizes that understanding requirements and validating solution design are worth the effort.
Reducing the Risks
Capturing requirements and generating user stories shows how to reduce the risks of misunderstood requirements and defective solution design in five modules:
Capture what users want
Understand what users need
Understand the underlying process
Understand the data model
Capture user stories
What users want often differs from what they need or what the business needs. The “Understanding what users need” module recommends asking why a user wants a feature, then continuing to asking “why?” about each answer until the essential purpose of the feature emerges. If the essential purpose meets a valid business need, the feature undergoes further analysis, providing context for a process map.
The “Understand the underlying process” module shows how to validate requirements with a process map. Creating the map asks the six essential questions from the Business process mapping course to flesh out the requirements. Stakeholders review the process map to share understanding and agree on the requirements.
Understanding the underlying process captures actions, their causes, and outcomes. Understanding the data model covers what the actions affect, entities like accounts, contacts, or opportunities. It shows how to create an entity-relationship diagram with the Elements platform, mapping out the solution’s entities and their relationships with each other.
Capturing requirements and generating user stories concludes with capturing user stories from a well-understood process map and data model. Each activity in the process map provides the content for a user story: who does what and why. The data model specifies what each user story can act upon. The combination of user stories and the data model gives architects and developers enough to start designing and building a solution.
Lessons Learned
The Elements Academy courses highlighted here have many examples showing how to use the Elements platform to:
Capture requirements and user stories
Create process maps and entity-relationship diagrams
Connect any of the above to other digital assets, such as documents or web pages
A cynical person could assert that the Academy is simply a vehicle for selling the Elements platform. Yet, the cynic misses the larger value of the Academy to the business analysis and architecture communities. The Academy promotes the benefits of good business analysis and solution design while warning about the risks of misunderstood or incomplete requirements.
Business analysts and architects should educate stakeholders about the benefits a solution brings to a business process, balanced against the risks. Elements Academy educates people about the benefits of business analysis and validated architecture, along with the risks of neglecting those endeavors. It shows how business analysts and architects can realize those benefits on the Elements platform.
Developing software solutions is risky but worthwhile when done right. The 2020’s started with businesses under extraordinary demand for online services as soon as possible (see Accelerated Expectations for examples). The Business process mapping course contrasts solution development speed with velocity:
“Everybody wants apps delivered faster (speed), but what they need is velocity (speed in a given direction). Analysis makes sure you are building the right apps – fast. But most importantly, you’re building the right ones.”
Business analysis and validated solution design set development off in the right direction - toward greater business value.
Elements Academy stresses good business analysis and solution design. It shows how to put them in action to develop a solution that fits business needs.