That’s why you, as a BPM analyst, choose the Pega platform!

As a Business Analyst you are an important link within an organization. With your social skills and substantive knowledge you build bridges between departments to develop new opportunities. But in which knowledge will you distinguish yourself, how are you of indispensable value for an organization and can you make an immediate impact in your work? At BPM Company, our business analysts choose and develop for Pega. Our colleague Elise Bleijerveld, Business Architect, explains why they choose this in this blog.

Elise, can you tell us something about yourself first?

Last January I was fully engaged as a developer/business analyst at Customs, and I developed with the IBM BPM platform. I was not immediately looking for something new, but after my first contact with BPM Company and the possibilities of the development platform of Pegasystems, I got motivated and decided to take action. And so three months later I was a Pega Business Architect at BPM Company.

Were you able to get started in this role right away?

No, the first two weeks consisted of a lot of learning for me. I was unfamiliar with Pega, but I was familiar with another low-code application, IBM’s BPM. The big difference that I immediately noticed was that I was used to working with three separate ‘components’ of IBM, such as a rule and integration designer. Pega turned out to be much more comprehensive from the start. After earning a number of certifications for both the analyst and developer roles, I was able to work with Pega, and am now a little over a year later.

How was your first experience as a Pega Business Architect?

I started my assignment at MN Services, a pension provider with good Pega developers. The application for which I was deployed has been used stably by several departments for some time now. As with any start, this was tough, not only because the retirement landscape is complicated, but also because the existing Pega application contained many different elements. Where I focused on one part with IBM, mainly shaping the process and letting it ‘flow’, I had to take into account the great variety that Pega offered. During this assignment I was very busy collecting user wishes, analyzing the possibilities of Pega and explaining it to users and also some testing. In short, a lot of different activities that enabled me to get to know Pega well in a year.

Does Pega bring you what you expected?

In order to answer that, it is important to mention that when I started my job at Customs, and with that development in IBM BPM, I had very little experience in programming and IT work in general. So it was very difficult for me to become familiar with the possibilities of the IBM products. Due to the intensive training at BPM Company, the start was therefore different.

There are also major differences between IBM and Pega. Where in Pega you have a complete package as a basis, to which you can add extra components as desired, you have various separate applications with IBM. For example, you have a separate application for ‘rule design’, which you must actively implement and integrate with the BPM application. In addition, integrating with external services works very differently than in Pega. For some developers this will be nice, for others not. On the one hand, this makes the application fairly accessible in the beginning, but as soon as you want more than just the basics, you will have to program and integrate more yourself. Customs also made extensive use of custom code for the front-end design because this was not sufficient for the user’s wishes. I have not come across this with Pega assignments.

Is Pega user-friendly for you as a Business Analyst?

Pega has a lot of options at the start. So much that I probably haven’t discovered half of it yet. This makes the product overwhelming in the beginning, sometimes difficult to understand, but in the end a lot faster and more logical to navigate once you are used to the many possibilities.

Are you happy with your choice and Pega is recommended?

For someone as impatient as I am, it was nice to be able to do everything quickly in one application. This makes me prefer Pega. Of course there are a lot of nuances here and it will probably continue to be an apples to oranges comparison in many areas, but for me the switch to Pega has been the right one. For me, Pega offers more possibilities to collaborate with developers, being able to do something faster because it has everything in 1 and a greater low-code content.

Are you enthusiastic after reading and curious whether Pega is the best choice for you? Please contact us. Do you want to experience it yourself? Contact us so we can introduce you to the possibilities of this platform.

Thanks