We are on a mission to improve the efficiency of GitLab by designing and implementing scalable Business Solutions.
We are a global team of five, focused on designing, delivering, and maintaining high quality business systems solutions. To learn more about our individual job functions, visit the BSA families page. To meet the team, check out our intro video below!
Barbara Roncato - Senior Business Systems Analyst
GitLab handle: @broncato
Slack handle: @barbara
Location and Timezone: Portugal, WEST/GMT+1
Linkedin Profile: /roncatobarbara
Kayoko Cooper - Business Systems Analyst
GitLab handle: @kayokocooper
Slack handle: @Kayoko Cooper
Location and Timezone: USA, EDT/EST
Linkedin Profile: /kayoko-cooper-a1063522
Kristina Koceban - Senior Business Systems Analyst
GitLab handle: @kkoceban
Slack handle: @Kristina
Location and Timezone: Ireland, WEST/GMT+1
Linkedin Profile: /kristinakoceban
Nicholas Sandoval - Business Systems Analyst
GitLab handle: @nicosando
Slack handle: @Nico Sandoval
Location and Timezone: USA, EDT/EST
Linkedin Profile: /nicolas-sandoval-331900b3
Santhosh Baranidharan - Senior Business Systems Analyst
GitLab handle: @sbaranidharan
Slack handle: @Santhosh
Location and Timezone: Netherlands, CET/GMT+2
Linkedin Profile: /santhosh-b-28711613a
Being business process first, we focus on requirements, use cases and process flows in order to help implement new systems, enhance existing processes or deliver fixes. On a project, our role includes requirements documentation, business process mapping, gap analysis, project scoping, timeline planning, and scheduling. We also manage relationships by working closely with cross-functional business and vendor teams to implement new enterprise applications that are coming on board. In doing so, we follow a process that ensures we keep multiple groups aligned as we iterate to get the systems up quickly and efficiently.
We often assist on the roll-out of new applications and systems. This involves vendor evaluations, current state documentation. A few systems we have recently implemented are:
We partner closely with business stakeholders to help them improve existing business processes or help to design new ones. This involves identifying points of failure, inefficiencies and manual work in our stakeholder's activities that could be improved through automation or other tools. We also intake change requests from stakeholders that require smaller systems improvements.
We have high level views of the enterprise application ecosystem and can help troubleshoot where a business process has broken down or a system flow is not working as expected.
Slack Channel: #enterprise-apps
Slack Tag: @bsa
GitLab: You can also tag the Business Systems Analysts Team in GitLab using @gitlab-com/business-technology/enterprise-apps/bsa
EntApps works to ensure GitLab’s Order-to-Cash (OTC) lifecycle is as efficient as possible, supporting our internal business teams and applications involved throughout the OTC process. This includes working with teams such as Sales, Sales Ops, Billing, Procurement and Finance to understand and build solutions for their business problems. To do this, we partner with other technical teams and application owners within the OTC process, such as Engineering and Sales Systems.
EntApps works to resolve business issues using a 5 stage process: Define, Design, Build, Test, and Deploy. More information about the 5 stages can be found in the Phase Exit Criteria section.
The first step to engage the Business Systems Analysts is opening an intake issue using the “Request” template under the Enterprise Application Group | Intake Project.
On a weekly basis, the Enterprise Applications Business Systems Analyst (BSA) will review all open Intake Issues and assign them to a specific BSA to perform Discovery duties. Additional information will be requested in the Issue.
Depending on the complexity and urgency of the request, the BSA will either track work and provide updates directly in the Issue or create a project Epic to properly manage more-intricate requests.
The Enterprise Application BSA team is responsible for creating project Epics and ensuring that they are regularly updated at each stage of the project. Projects consist of 6 Epics and a Change Management Issue. A single parent Epic is created with 5 children Epics that represent each phase of the project.
The templates that we use to structure our parent and children epics are documented in the EntApps Project Epics Templates issue.
During Define, EntApps articulates the business problem and definition of done. This phase covers uses cases, technology impacted and requirements. The ultimate goal of Define is not to figure out everything but to document the process and what is impacted. Finally, before beginning the design, we request approval sign-off from key stakeholders to ensure business requirements are accurate and all-inclusive.
Business Systems Analysts
Technical
This phase creates the roadmap of how things will work in the future. Here the EntApps will work with the business to design a future state process and refine the requirements to build it. This phase should iron out all the details and questions from above.
Business Systems Analysts
Technical
In the Build phase, EntApps collaborates with other stakeholders to develop solutions that meet the business requirements but also that are scalable and aligned with best-practices.
Business Systems Analysts
Technical
EntApps collaborates with other stakeholders to develop test scripts and facilitates the user acceptance testing process.
Business Systems Analysts
Technical
EntApps owns developing a deployment plan and collaborating with other implementation teams to ensure completeness. This involves launch plans, user enablement, and go-live communications.
Business Systems Analysts
Technical
The Enterprise Applications team identifies 3-4 OKRs per quarter, focused on main implementations and enhancement of existing processes that will be beneficial to the entire company.
Our OKRs are documented and tracked in GitLab.com in the appropriated project epic. If an epic or issue is being used to track an OKR, the labels ~"BT-KR::Enterprise Application KR" and the correct BT FY OKR need to be added.
Rolly is a program status rollup automation tool and the BSAs use it to extract key status information from their current project epics and compile them into one issue every week. This issue is then used in different meetings to cover project statuses, what's in progress and what is blocked.
Labels help us organize and tag our work so we can track and find the work items we’re interested in. The most common labels used by the BSAs are described below.
| Label | Description | Project/Group |
|---|---|---|
| ~"BSA" | Business Systems Analysts work | gitlab-com |
| ~"BT-Priority::1" | Critical | gitlab-com, gitlab-org |
| ~"BT-Priority::2" | Important not urgent | gitlab-com, gitlab-org |
| ~"BT-Priority::3" | No rush to do, but please do it | gitlab-com, gitlab-org |
| ~"BT Finance Systems" | For anything related to a Finance System (i.e. Zuora, Netsuite, Tipalti, Expensify, etc.). Catch all to ensure a Finance Systems Admin is aware and can triage as necessary. | gitlab-com, gitlab-org |
| ~"BT::Backlog" | Unless a due date is indicated or urgency specified, non-access related issues will go into the backlog and prioritized bi-weekly | gitlab-com |
| ~"BT::To Do" | Team will look at the issue within a week of submitting | gitlab-com |
| ~"BT::In Progress" | Team is currently actively working on scoping out and gathering requirements | gitlab-com |
| ~"BT::Done" | Business Technology team tasks completed. | gitlab-com |
For more information about Labels, check the Labels page from our GitLab docs.
The team follows GitLab meeting practices and standards.
While we can't promise we'll never have meetings on Fridays, the team has adopted No Meetings Fridays, and uses these days for focus work.
- The time of this meeting varies every week to accommodate the different timezones of the Enterprise Apps team members.
The purpose of engagement meetings is to focus on Roadmap Prioritization, Issues, Risks and Decisions. Engagement Meetings are strategic meetings to ensure that Enterprise Applications are aligned with their key business partners and they have clarity on our shared roadmap. Decisisons and timing are recorded in a shared Decision Log to ensure that there is clarity and decision are properly documentated (Prioritization).
How we operate:
