Business Analyst: Tips to pass your certification exam

The Business Analyst certification has been available since July 2022, so it is quite recent, shady, dark and full of secrets, as there isn’t much information and study materials about it. 

We are two gentle and experienced Business Analysts who successfully concluded the certification. We want to share with you all that we learned from this path to glory and help you who want to take the BA certification with success.

This article intends to give you some vital information about the certification and, most importantly, some tips to pass with success. But, of course, always check the Exam Guide to get the most updated information.

Topics in this article

1. Certification Details
2. Audience
3. Resources
4. How much time is required for the certification?
5. BA certification tips
6. Global opinion after doing the certification

1. Certification Details

This certification follows most of the pattern rules from Salesforce certifications. However, one slight change is the passing score, which is 72%, which is rather different from the existing certifications. It also needs the Administrator Certification before being able to complete it:

It also has the BA certification guide available: Certification Guide

One way to thoroughly understand the topics and how to study them is to discriminate the different exam sections. Here are what you need to know:

Customer Discovery: 17%

• Determine business strategies, goals, initiatives, and challenges to define the scope of business analysis.
• Discover how a customer is leveraging and benefiting from Salesforce products to establish the current state.
• Understand and explain Business Analyst roles and responsibilities in different phases of the implementation lifecycle.
• Apply the implementation lifecycle for planning business analysis activities.
• Analyze the customer’s Salesforce environment to identify opportunities and constraints.
• Demonstrate knowledge of Salesforce capabilities and its potential to recommend solutions to the business.

Collaboration with Stakeholders: 24%

• Plan discovery activities based on the target stakeholders to thoroughly analyse business needs.
• Identify key stakeholders and develop relationships with them as trusted advisors to act as a liaison between business and technical teams.
• Given a scenario, choose the most effective technique for eliciting business needs from stakeholders.
• Explain how to move from the current state analysis to an agreed future state design.
• Understand how Salesforce features and best practices impact solution options and business processes.
• Given a scenario, manage competing priorities to obtain sign-off from stakeholders.

Business Process Mapping: 16%

• Demonstrate how to define the scope of a complex business process and break it down into manageable steps.
• Apply an understanding of hierarchical process mapping to engage stakeholders at different levels of an organization.
• Analyze and document a business process to elicit requirements and identify resources to visualize a future state.
• Apply governance on agreed future state processes to control scope.

Requirements: 17%

• Distinguish between requirements vs user stories to engage business and technical stakeholders.
• Verify and prioritize existing needs and identify new requirements to develop the future state.
• Document requirements in a version-controlled repository to manage scope.

User Stories: 18%

• Understand the components of a user story to perform a thorough analysis.
• Contrast the difference between acceptance criteria vs the definition of done.
• Document user stories in a version-controlled repository to manage scope.

User Acceptance: 8%

• Define and prepare the User Acceptance Test plan to confirm that the solution meets the business requirements.
• Guide UAT and manage the results to determine whether the solution meets the requirements.
• Given a scenario, make a go/no-go release decision when new business or technical issues arise.

2. Audience

As the name states, this is a Business Analyst certification, hence (you guessed it!), it is meant for Business Analysts. But it does not mean that other roles can’t enrol as well! Other personas are encouraged to do it, as they usually are part of the analysis of the different user stories that enrol on a Sprint. Scrum Masters, Consultants, Administrators and Product Owners are other candidates to do this certification.

3. Resources

Each certification has a unique path a candidate walks through to reach its end. The Business Analyst certification, although pretty new, also has its tracks:

Trailhead:
Prepare for your Salesforce BA credential

Focus On Force

Stellaxius gives all employees that want to run certification access to Focus on Focus material. We think the material is good (reference links and questions); however, if you think you will get the same questions, you don’t. But the questions available are similar and help you get an idea of how the questions will be in the certification exam.

4. How much time is required for the certification?

Time is a funny thing. How can it be defined? Who makes the rules? Well, each person has their definition of time and manages their life around that.

The time required for this certification is the same: each individual knows how much time he needs to reach his goal. 

But, as mentioned above, there are different percentages for the topics presented on the certification. So the time spent should be directly correlated with those percentages. 

The time spent also differs from the experience that the candidate has as a BA. It does make a difference!

But to give you an idea, the trail mix is estimated to be around 20 hours. Plus, exam practice is 4 hours minimum.

5. BA certification tips

Talking about certifications, talking about tips! One goes with the other. Here are a few that might help you out (you are welcome!) :

1. Understand the role the BA plays on a project, what skills are required, and what is a plus.
2. Know how Business Analysis should be conducted, what happens in each phase, which should be involved and why
3. Have clear who the Personas are
4. Practice, Practice, Practice writing User Stories and Acceptance Criteria. You need to know that User Stories are INVEST, aren’t solutions, are what Users ask, and are not attached to a system.
5. Know the difference between Waterfall from Agile. And Scrum and Kanban
6. Understand Requirements Elicitation
7. Think about who Stakeholders are vs Personas. Associate RACI with Stakeholders

All these topics are described in the modules part of the trailmix identified above.

6. Global opinion after doing the certification

Opinions, opinions…

Each one has its own, and rarely in accordance. But guess what! The two authors of this masterpiece have the same opinion on this subject!

The first difference that you will notice is the typology of the questions. For each (huge!) question, the answers are always three, and only one is right. Forget two or three correct choices out of 5 (phew!).

Another characteristic of this certification you need to pay attention to is the scenario of the questions. They tend to be really long and full of dangers! If not read carefully, the chances of having the right answers are decreased exponentially.

As mentioned in this article, experience in the role of BA obviously is a great help when doing the BA certification (who would know). On the other hand, that same experience might be troubling as well. And why is that? Purely because your understanding and experience of what should be done in some scenarios may differ from the Salesforce standards. Keep your eyes open at all times!

Finally, there is the need to talk about the free dumps available online. If you are one of the naughty kind who keeps doing the free dumps online, remember that most of them have wrong answers that may mislead you. Be playful but with a conscious!

We hope we can guide you in your journey!

Good luck, and let us know how your certification went!

And if you are studying for others certifications, we also have tips about a bunch of themes take a look.