As a Salesforce Business Analyst, you’re not just gathering requirements and writing user stories, you’re often the guardian of long-term system success. That means playing a critical role in data governance, and in promoting best practices for how users interact with Salesforce and how the system is documented.
These responsibilities might not always be called out in your job description, but they are vital to maintaining a system that’s scalable, accurate, and valuable to your users.
Let’s break down what these terms mean in a Salesforce project and how you, as a BA, make them real. I’ll also walk through examples from Service Cloud and Experience Cloud projects where I’ve applied these principles.
What does “Supporting Data Governance” mean for a Salesforce BA?
Data governance is all about maintaining the integrity, quality, and security of your Salesforce data. As a BA, you’re often the first to identify risks, spot inconsistencies, and recommend data standards.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- Defining data standards: You work with business stakeholders to identify what fields are critical (ex: making “Graduation Year” required on Alumni records), what values should be used in picklists, and how statuses or categories should be defined.
- Recommending validation rules: You flag where data inconsistencies might arise and partner with Admins to implement rules that enforce data accuracy.
- Supporting access and sharing decisions: You gather requirements that inform who should see what data and help translate that into profiles, roles, and sharing rules.
- Helping prevent duplicates: You review the lead/contact/account creation process and recommend duplicate management strategies aligned with business workflows.
Good data governance doesn’t just come from technical settings, it’s driven by clear requirements and business rules, and that’s where the BA comes in.
Promoting best practices for system usage
As a Salesforce Business Analyst, you’re often responsible for encouraging behaviors that lead to consistent and meaningful system usage. This is especially important in orgs where users come from different departments or have varied levels of Salesforce experience.
You promote best practices when you:
- Map out clear processes that show how users should move through a workflow (ex: converting a Lead into a Contact and creating a Case).
- Identify areas for automation to reduce manual entry or errors like using auto-assignment rules for Cases or Flows to update statuses.
- Create training materials or partner with trainers to ensure end-users understand how and why to use Salesforce features as intended.
- Gather feedback from end-users during UAT and early rollout to spot pain points and make iterative improvements.
Your goal is to make it easy for users to do the right thing consistently.
Promoting best practices for documentation
Documentation is often overlooked, but as a BA, you’re perfectly positioned to drive it. You already sit between business and technical teams, which makes you the ideal person to ensure that:
- Business process documentation is accurate and up to date.
- Configuration decisions are clearly explained (ex: why a validation rule exists or what a flow automates).
- Release notes are created and shared after each sprint or deployment.
- Training guides, how-to articles, and walkthroughs are available for end-users.
By capturing institutional knowledge and creating a reliable system of documentation, you reduce dependency on individuals and increase system transparency.
Real world experience: Service cloud implementation at a university
Let’s say you’re the Salesforce Business Analyst on a Service Cloud project for a university’s alumni relations team. The team handles alumni support cases like transcript requests, event questions, and donations.
How You Support Data Governance:
- You define required fields like “Alumni ID,” “Request Category,” and “Preferred Contact Method.”
- You work with IT to identify how legacy systems manage alumni IDs, ensuring that Salesforce’s Contact object doesn’t receive conflicting or duplicate values.
- You recommend validation rules that prevent agents from closing a case without entering the resolution notes.
How You Promote Best Practices for System Usage:
- You run workshops with the support team to map out their current intake process, then standardize it using record types and automated case routing.
- You help configure Omni-Channel so agents can receive cases directly in real time based on skill and availability.
- You create dashboards that visualize metrics like time to resolution and open case volume by type.
How You Promote Best Practices for Documentation:
- You write a “Case Management Playbook” to outline how each type of case should be handled and escalated.
- You maintain a change log that captures configuration updates (ex: new picklist values or auto-response rules).
- You build training slides and a walkthrough video for new hires joining the alumni support team.