Role of a Pega Business Architect

The Business Architect works with stakeholders from both the client organization and Pega. On a Pega project, stakeholders from those two groups co-mingle as Business and IT teams. Members of the Business team understand the business process and organizational needs and requirements. Members of the IT team have experience in software development and know the transformational capabilities of Pega Platform.

Match the numbers to the following image to learn how you work at the intersection of Business and IT as a member of both teams:

1. Business: You work with stakeholders that understand the needs and requirements of the client organization and the business process. In your role as a Pega BA, you use your understanding of the business process to advocate on behalf of this Business team to ensure the application developed by the IT team meets the client organization's specified needs and requirements.

2. Pega BA: As a Pega BA, your work is at the intersection of Business and IT to ensure that the solution built by the IT team aligns with the needs and requirements of the client organization and business process. You do this by helping both the Business and IT teams work in close collaboration to design and build a Pega solution that both meets the business needs and is configured using Pega design best practices.

3. IT: You work with the Pega development team to understand the technical design pattern that will best meet the needs and requirements of the client organization and business process. In your role as a Pega BA, you will advocate on IT's behalf to ensure the Business stakeholders understand how the features and capabilities of the Pega solution add value through the transformed business process. In addition, you work with IT to create a library of reusable business assets to support faster implementation of future application features.

Throughout a project, your work with stakeholders from the Business and IT teams includes the following responsibilities:

Analysis

You gather information about the client organization, the business process, the business requirements, the customer, and the strategic outcome to ensure that you have a complete picture of all the problems before configuring a solution. As part of your analysis, you will work with the Business team to: 

• Understand the critical Stages and Steps of the business process, as well as the primary users of the process (both internal to the organization, and external)
• Identify the issues, gaps, bottlenecks, and manual workarounds within the existing business processes
• Understand the root causes of the failings of the existing process
• Identify the areas of functionality that are common across processes

As a Business Architect, a key goal is to identify what needs to be changed in the current Process and how the current issues affect the business outcomes. 

Process Design

You continuously optimize the workflow by evaluating the information you have gathered during your analysis and translating your insight using Pega GenAI Blueprint™.  Blueprint incorporates Pega GenAI capabilities and Pega best practices for workflow transformation to:  

• Remove unnecessary actions and assignments from the current workflow.
• Re-organize the workflow to streamline the sequence Stages, Processes, and Steps to make the workflow simpler to understand and operate.
• Automate repetitive activities to make the workflow more efficient.
• Intelligently allocate work to the appropriate users to reduce unnecessary hand-offs between team members and ensure that the right focus is applied to the most urgent work.
• Improve collaboration between team members and external customers to keep the stakeholders informed and up to date with the latest progress of the work.
• Consolidate information and data relevant to the user’s current activity to reduce time wasted collecting the essential data from multiple separate systems to complete work quickly, accurately, and effectively.

As a Business Architect, a key goal is to ensure that the new Blueprint-designed workflow meets the business objectives and simplifies the process for the end users. 

Alignment

Using Blueprint's workflow modeling capabilities, you work closely with representatives from both the Business team and Pega developers to collaborate on designing, building and testing the Pega solution. Your duties include:  

• Reviewing the Blueprint proposal to confirm alignment with the business needs and outcomes.
• Using Blueprint and App Studio to demonstrate the improvements for the end user resulting from the re-design of the workflow using Pega's out-of-the-box capabilities.
• Working with the technical teams to ensure they understand the business needs and essential requirements of the workflow.

As a Business Architect, a key goal is to ensure that the Business team understands the solution design and is enabled to provide the right guidance and feedback to keep the solution aligned with the business objectives. At the same time, your goal is to ensure that the Pega developers have an extremely good understanding of the business needs and requirements and are enabled to appropriately advise on the best use of Pega’s technical capabilities to meet those needs.  

Education

You educate the Business team stakeholders on delivery best practices while advising and guiding on Pega applications' out-of-the-box features. You support the Business team by explaining the value of those out-of-the-box features. You use your knowledge Blueprint and Pega Platform to demonstrate how the features improve their business processes by:

• Focusing on what needs to be accomplished to achieve the outcome, not on how work is currently being done
• Understanding what good simplification and optimization looks in Pega
• Designing processes for reuse across the Pega ecosystem

As a Business Architect, your goal is to continue this education throughout your project, enabling the business stakeholders to change their ways of working using the features of Pega software, to achieve business value, and to realize the benefits from their Pega application.  

Consider the following scenario:

Sara Han is a Pega BA who is working on an existing complaints management project built on Pega Platform. 

The project lead asks Sara to review the complaints management process to ensure that the business resolves customer concerns quickly and efficiently. When listening to team members from the business describe the outcomes needed to improve their customer satisfaction rating, she strives to understand the core issues affecting the business - the problems, process changes, and desired outcomes. By using her knowledge of both the business needs, Blueprint, App Studio, and Pega Platform technology, Sara:     

• Educates stakeholders from the business team on the out-of-the-box features of Pega Platform, such as the ability to automatically route work to the appropriate users using business rules, or automatically distribute notification of approval requests by email and mobile. She explains that these features reduce the time to resolve a complaint, which improves customer satisfaction and increases the business value as a result. 

• Aligns with both Business team representatives to redesign the existing workflow, and with the IT team to configure the out-of-the-box features of Pega Platform, to automate and streamline tasks performed manually by the complaints team. Sara also helps the Business team to introduce automated, skill-based work allocation and Service-Level Agreement logic and notifications, to achieve faster problem resolution, improved customer satisfaction, and alignment with business objectives. 

The structure of the project team varies from project to project depending on many factors including the project's size, its complexity, as well as the number and experience of the Pega Business Architects involved. On larger projects, multiple BAs work together as a team sharing the workload. On small projects, a single BA might be all that is required.  

In addition to the responsibilities detailed above: Analysis, Process Design, Alignment, and Education, the Pega BA has other responsibilities that are common to all projects, irrespective of size. Some examples of these common responsibilities are: 

• Facilitating meetings to gather requirements that support the business process transformation. You organize and facilitate focused meetings with stakeholders and subject matter experts (SMEs) to gather and document the business processes and requirements to satisfy the needs of both the client organization and the customer. During these meetings, you guide stakeholder understanding by translating how the out-of-the-box features of Pega Platform meet business requirements. 

• Identifying and documenting business requirements.  You document business requirements as user stories using Blueprint, App Studio’s Agile workbench, and other Scrum project management processes and tools available in Pega Platform. Pega developers use the user stories to configure the application to address the business requirements in a way that makes the best use of the strengths and capabilities of Pega.

• Using Blueprint and App Studio to demonstrate the out-of-the-box functionality of Pega Platform in the new business processes workflow. You use Blueprint to quickly redesign a workflow based on Pega’s out-of-the-box features and case management best practices Visualizing the workflow in Blueprint helps build alignment with stakeholders for the Pega application. You also use App Studio to demonstrate how additional features of Pega Platform address the business requirements.

• Promoting Pega best practices. Through years of implementations, Pega has developed best practices across the project landscape, including organizational structure, user story and backlog creation, governance, and testing. You follow and instruct on these best practices throughout the application design and delivery process.

On some projects, a Business Architect might also have responsibilities around risk management, governance, development of the user interface, reporting, standard setting, stakeholder analysis, project scoping and sizing, testing, or production support. Although the more senior BAs of the project most likely receive these duties, it is important for all BAs to harness any opportunity to learn about these additional tasks. 

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