Terminology and Career Context
I.
OFA Vocabulary and career path
- A.A new OFA is surrounded by vocabulary that will feel unfamiliar at first: requirements, artifacts, triage, discovery, stakeholders, workstreams.
- B.Learning this vocabulary is not a side task - it is the first real piece of OFA work, because an OFA who cannot use these terms correctly cannot yet participate in the conversations where they matter.
- C.Module 3 of this curriculum is devoted entirely to building this skill; Appendix A provides a glossary.
- D.A new OFA should treat unfamiliar terms as something to look up and confirm, not guess at.
II.
Role Language and career trajectory
- A.The OFA career path continues beyond Level 1 into OFA 2 (Developing Stewardship), where an OFA begins to independently own a defined workstream, facilitate requirements discussions, and create documentation from scratch, and continues further into Levels 3 through 5, where accountability broadens across all four stewardship areas and the OFA begins shaping direction rather than only contributing to it.
- B.This curriculum does not attempt to teach OFA 2 or later work; a companion OFA 2 curriculum and a Level 3-5 curriculum exist for that purpose.
- C.This document's purpose is to build the foundation that makes that later growth possible: reliable habits, accurate use of terminology, and demonstrated trustworthiness with small stewardships.
III.
Industry Standards and Frameworks
A.
Overview
While the OFA title itself is unique to the Church, the underlying discipline draws on established business analysis and IT service management fields.
B.
Business Analysis — BABOK
- 1.The most directly relevant reference is the Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK), maintained by the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA).
- 2.BABOK organizes business analysis work into knowledge areas such as elicitation and collaboration, requirements life cycle management, and strategy analysis.
A new OFA does not need to read the full BABOK Guide, but should recognize that the habits this curriculum teaches — contributing to requirements, maintaining artifacts, supporting testing — map to recognized professional competencies used across the industry, not something invented uniquely for this role.
C.
IT Service Management — ITIL
- 1.A second useful reference point is IT service management, commonly organized around the ITIL framework, which describes how technology organizations plan, deliver, and support services.
- 2.OFAs are not IT service management practitioners, but the Operational and Technical Support stewardship area draws directly on ITIL concepts such as incident, request, and change — vocabulary that will reappear as the learner progresses into more technical OFA work.
D.
What This Means for OFA 1
- 1.An OFA 1 is not expected to study these frameworks formally.
- 2.What matters at this level is recognizing that the discipline exists, and that many of the "common sense" habits taught in this curriculum have names and formal descriptions in the broader industry — which becomes useful once the OFA begins working alongside vendors, contractors, or partners who use that vocabulary.