Best Practices Guide for Business System Analysts

by Hillary Chambers

HEUG has put together this guide in hopes of making things a little easier for you and your team.

How do you support users with additional training and coaching?

Quality Staff Training

Video Tutorials
Instruction Guides
Shared Folders

Create documentation (both written and video) that outline the appropriate procedure for a specific business process. Conduct additional meetings with individuals on your team to answer questions. It is essential that individuals have the opportunity to learn through different means. Therefore, more than one training and/or coaching method is imperative to help individuals master the business process.

In-person training (1:1 or group sessions)
Zoom training
Weekly team meetings and regular communication to share updates and processes
Presenting new or updated features at the annual full-staff meeting

I am part of a team that trains new staff. My responsibilities surround navigating our SIS and processing flow. I also troubleshoot system issues before they go to our IT area. While executing those parts of my job, I try to instill two things:
1) The people my department of BSAs “worry about” are the people we never hear from – are they suffering in silence?
2) If anyone encounters something that makes them think, “Hmm, that’s odd.” we’d like to know. That would give us an opportunity to provide more background OR possibly solve something before it can become a large issue.
Jessica H., DePaul University

Do you have best practice documentation? Do you find that your documentation is followed with little error?

This one is a little tricky…

Some processes have better documentation than others. We always try to provide detailed and accurate documentation but that is not always achieved. We request input monthly from end-users to help us identify where documentation is lacking so we can improve. This allows us to also find out why they don’t read or follow specific documentation so that we can adjust to the needs. If end users can’t follow documentation without making errors, we assume it is our issue to solve by improving documentation and providing additional training.

While documentation may be available, the user may not follow the steps as intended. This may be caused by confusion with the directions based on what is written, or based on the users’ previous experience. In order for the user to feel comfortable with the correct process, they must complete it successfully multiple times. A combination of learning methods is needed to help the users.

My team practices Scrum/Agile, so our focus is from the Agile Manifesto “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Working software over comprehensive documentation“. We provide release note information to our end-user offices, who in turn use it to create training guides, knowledge based articles and\or blog posts about functionality.
Amy B., Indiana University