BA diploma Revision Flashcards
Explain the purpose of an organisation’s vision
A vision is a statement that defines the ideal state of an organisation. Provide clarity for the organisation existing.
Apply a suitable technique to analyse the internal environment
VMOST and Resource Audit
Vision, Mission, Objectives. Strategy, Tactics.
Resource Audit
(Tangible and Non tangible parts of the company)
Physical - Buildings, Equipment, Trains
Human - Staff skill set, Loyalty, How long they been in the company
Financial - What are the finances of the company
- this can all feed into out internal side of SWOT analysis
Apply a suitable technique to analyse the external environment
PESTLE -
Political - Force in politics that can change the way you handle business
Economics - Force in budget environment that can change the way you handle business
Social Culture - Trends within social culture
Technology - Trends with in Tech
Legal - Trend and expectations towards legal legistration (Discrimination act, GRPD)
Environment - Changes in your environment such as ecological (Climate change, Echo emissions, pollution, society)
Porters 5 forces
Power for supplier - How much do your rely on the supply to run your business, and how much is there of it
Power of Buyer - Does the buyer have other options they can go to
Threat of new entrants - New systems and better systems may be coming
Threat of substitute products - New cheaper items coming.
Competitors
Prepare a SWOT analyses
Two parts
Strengths and weaknesses - Internal
Opportunity and threats - External
Must align to your vision of the VMOST
Internal can be found from your resource audit
External can be found from PESTLE and 5 forces
Tools to measure performance
CSF - Critical Success Factor
KPIs - Key point Indicators
Performance Targets
CSF - Company needs sales staff trained in Ezone course customer safety.
KPI - How many employees have signed up and completed training
PT - Must have 7 staff employees to signed up and completed training in the sales department for Ezone course ‘Customer Safety’
Business Balance scorecard
4 perspectives - Financial, Customers perspective, Learning and growth, Business Processes
Must have a goal and target
Learning and Growth - goal: To have a strong team that have intelligence of gourmet fish food. - Target - Make sure we hire 3 people with degree in the subject
Customer Perspective: Goal: To be seen as the number mortgage choice provider. Target: Make store look presentable for shop window
Business Processes: Be able to sell top quality houses. Inactive. Make sure we are talking to clients with houses marked up at over £1 million pounds, Initiatives: Speak to clients
Financial - Increase revenue, Increase percentage of houses on the market
Identify generic stakeholders via the stakeholder wheel
Parters - Example: an outsourcing company that provide catering services
Suppliers: A supplier needs to be notified of changes and understand the benefits the change will bring themselves.
Regulators: Need stakeholders there to make sure the change is not impacting against any legistrations rules and regulations.
Managers.
Subject matter experts
Customers
Competitors - how they might react will they block the change?
Explain the activities required to engage with stakeholders
Identify stakeholders
Challenge an inform stakeholders
Negioate stakeholder conflict
Written and verbal communication
Support and facilitate stakeholders through meetings.
CATWOE to analyse stakeholders perspective
Use CATWOE to analyse how the business should be run by a stakeholder perspective
For a bookstore
Customer - Local residents, people with a thirst for horror and fiction novels and subscribed to our membership programme
Actor - Salesman, and safe
Transformation - Sells books that are mainly only horror and fiction
Worldview - Providing a service to our people who want to lose their heads in a good fiction book for a few hours, the books are second-hand which reduces our carbon footprint and profit margins
Owner - The bookshop keeper
Environment - Comes from PESTLE (Funded by local community) reduces carbon footprint by recycling old books
Categorise stakeholders in terms of their power and interest.
Power Interest grid
INTEREST AND POWER
Constant management
Keep satisfied
watch
Keep onside
ignore
keep informed
Choose suitable methods to research the business situation
Websites of the organisation
What its values are, what its missions and visions are.
Incites to the level of professionalism for their website
Company reports
Information on the current processes and procedures, Explains the target market and perspectives of stakeholders
Organization charts
How the company is structured, who sits where in terms of hierarchy
Identify - Quantitative and qualitive investigation techniques
Qualitive:
Workshop - Good for big groups, getting a consensus - Time wasting hard to get everyone’s time
Interview - Good rapport but bias
Observation - good for tacit knowledge but might act differently
Scenario Analysis - Good for risk management - can get really confusing
Quantitative
Customer Surveys / Questionnaires - great for getting a lot of data but can be very high level
Document analysis - Good for explicit knowledge but can be tedious
Tools to represent current business situations
Customer journey mapping - touchpoints, personas,
empathy mapping
mind maps
rich picture
Use a BAM Business Activity Model
A BAM is derived from relative stakeholders. From the Transformation of the CATWOE such as ‘Rents Video’ You then have 3 activities Plan Enable do - Monitor and then control
Decide on books to sell
Enable - Buy books, decide prices
Do - Stock books, sell books
Monitor - Monitor buying patterns - Control this
Explain the three types of business events
Internal, external, time bound
Stakeholder attitudes
Champion
An active advocate for the project, who is willing to use their political capital to remove obstacles
Supporter
Supports the project
Neutral
Has no views for or against the project
Critic
Does not oppose the project actively
Opponent
Aims to disrupt the project
Blocker
Tries to sabotage the project, mainly for personal reasons
Explain the use of The TOM
The target operating model is used to describe how the business needs to be established.
We needs POPIT to use an holistic approach
P - People, what sort of people do we need for the target state. What level of motivation is required, what is their skill set.
Organisation - Who will the key partners or suppliers, How many people are needed in what roles, how will this align to our culture
Processes - Which process will be used to in the target state. What efficiency gains will be obtained
Ifomrati9onal - What change will be made to capture store and analyse data, how strong will it be.
Technology - What tech will be used in the currents state? - How will this align to our processes.
Identity and design the solution - Design thinking
Empathise
Define,
Ideate,
Prototype.
Evaluate ,
Create
Explain divergent and convergent thinking
Divergent is we use as many ideas as we can come up with by exploring many solutions
Convergent is where we come up with one established idea.
Explain the process of gap analysis
We compare the current state to the future state,
If the problem is localised we tend to use prototype, use cases.
If the problem impacts the processes, or an entire business we will use Fishbone diagram, rich pictures as is diagrams to understand the current state
The desired can be from a BAM or a TOM or To-be process maps
Potential issues include - Staff don’t have the skill set, we don’t have enough staff, The process will not support the current tech we have,
What areas are in a feasibility study and explain them
Business, Technical and financial
Business - Does it match our objectives, Must be delivered in a time frame, Does the application work will with our current application architecture, does it meet our companies values, must align with other processes. including those that are not changing. Does it comply with relevant laws
Technical - Is the hardware reliable, what’s the performance like, is it maintainable, security to protect users and their data. Do we need to provide training, is it proven, is it home-grown or commercial of the the self, will we need internal help to configure it
Financial - Can we afford this? The need for borrowing via buying for this ourselves benefits. and the calculation for investment on return
Appraisal techniques (Financial)
Payback, discounted cash flow and net present value
Payback calculation is a simple of way and seeing when your project will break even over a time - It doesn’t however show the value of todays money, also ignores cash flow once we broke even.
Discounted cash flow is a rate that can be found out by contacting the management accountant, Discounted cash flow reflects the time value of money.
The net present value is what reflects the calculation of when you time the discounted cash flow against the cash flow for the year, which gives you a more accurate description of what your money is worth today
Internal rate of return is where our discount rate needs to make our NPV = 0 - This way it makes it easier to compare with other projects, which option we should use.
explain the rationale for a business case
Identify the need, identify the costs, provide information for decision makers
Four management levels of a business case
Key decision makers - that give the go or no decision on investment
Senior business management -Who will be involved in fulfilling the cooperate strategy and wants to be involved
Project management and team - who will be responsible for the tasks and deliverables
Project records - to see how well the business case turned out in terms to reality
What is in a business case?
BOSCARD - Background, Objectives, Scope, constants, Assumptions, roles and responsibilities and deliverables.
Introduction - sets up the scene and why we are doing the business case
Management summary - Should detail what the whole project is about, options we considered, the statement of recommendation, what studies we did to find out about the issues we were having.
Disruption of current state
Options considered
Option description - Cost and benefits - either tangible or non tangible
Impact assessment -
Risk assessment
Recommendations - time scales
Appendices - supporting documents
Identify risks - what are the three main events
Business, technical and project risks
How to find out about risks
Brainstorming, questionnaires
What is in a risk assessment
The description, probability, impact, owner and countermeasures
What are the countermeasures (management)
Mitigate( make something less severe), transfer(Give it to a third party), accept (Accept and choose weather resolves, avoid or transfer) or avoid
Can risks be positive
Yes, over 100 people sign up to our website and it crashes
Levels of impact it can have on the business
Organisational structure =
explain Business case and business change lifecycle how do they relate
Alignment, define, design, implementation, realisation
Does the change align to our culture our values, are we in alignment with PESTLE
Definition - Cost, benefit analysis and time scales - What is our problem and how we going to tackle this
Design - requirements, tested the solution, development
Implementation - Checks against original estimates, is the project still viable
Realisation - what was our lesson learnt, review the predicted benefits, which are being achieved and what needs further action
Analyse the cost and benefits
Tangible and non Tangible
Immediate and Longer term
Tangible cost - Staff costs, equipment, Packaged software,
Tangible benefit - Staff savings, Faster responses, Reduced effort and faster responses to customers
Intangible cost - Recruitment, disruption and loss to productivity, brand damage, loss of employee moral
Intangible benefit - improved moral, Better communications, Improved customer satisfaction.
Describe the term requirements
A feature that the business users need the new system to provide
They reflect the overall needs of the business and needs to be implemented via the solution, it supports the business and addresses the issues that we are experiencing
Disadvantage to requirements
To little definition and not enough definition.
Ambiguity - sometimes requirements are quite vague
Can be bias and from one view point
Lack of traceability
Describe the requirement framework
Requirement Elicitation
Requirement Analysis - Make sure they are clear and understandable and SMART - Prioritise MoSCoW
Requirement Validation - Make sure they have been validated by a Sponsor
Requirement documentation - Make sure they are well documented - BRD - what we need Functional requirement - how we are going to do it
Requirement Management - Covering change management, version control - Document the change, analyse the change consider time cost and benefits, Change in scope, competition, legist ration
What’s in a terms of reference
Typically before the project gets underway, The scope, the objectives, deliverables, constraints - LIMIT on time and budget
Uses framework OSCAR
Objectives, scope, constraints, authority, resources
What is PID
Its a project management tool, that is always open (meaning it can be updated) - It involves the commutation plan, the risk management plan, the communication plan, roles and responsivities, the project def and project approach
Explain the difference between tacit and Explicit - What techniques would you use
Tacit is knowledge is hard to find, it usually is found during observation technique - shadowing, observation, prototyping, Its more to find our how users interact with a functionality and how we can make it easier and streamline services for the user.
Explicit knowledge - is easier to find document analysis - Its like laws and legistrations, things that wont change
Name elicitation techniques for quantitative and qualitative
Qualitative - Workshops - Interviews - Observations, Scenario analysis
Quotative - Document analysis, Survey / Questionnaires
What techniques do you need as a BA
Personal qualities, Professional techniques and business knowledge
Personal qualities - Leadership, influential, negotiator, politically aware, team working, problem solving
Professional Technique - Investigation techniques, business modelling and gap analysis
Business Knowledge - Commercial aware, good domain knowledge, subject matter expertise
Hierarchy of requirements what are the type of requirements
Objectives link to requirements
Business and solution requirements
Business requirements - General and Technology
Solution is functional and non functional
Business is - Budget, constraints, legal, branding, policies
Technical - Hardware, Software, must interact with our systems
Functional - Is the what we are going to do and non functional is how we are going to do it
Functional - Data entry, Data entrance, Data maintenance - changes to data. user shall enter name when prompted, user shall change name in the settings - Entrance and maintenance
Non functional - Performance - Speed of something
Security - Business user personal informational shall be encrypted with apportioned software
Avalablility - Solution must be avaible during opening times.
The importance of them
Provide consistency, validation and development -
To types of documentation styles for requirement
Text based - user stories, requirement catalogue
Diagram - Use case, business model, data model
Requirement document
Introduction, models, data models, requirements catalogue and appendix
What’s in a requirement catalogue
ID - Author - date captures - Requirement description - status
User stories
Between the product owner and developers
AS A
I WANT TO
SO THAT
Explain the rationale for functional requirements
unambiguous communication, generating questions, cross checking for completeness and consistency
Describe the purpose of modelling in RE
Communicate and describe the functionality and data requirements
Describe a use case model
So, you have the actors and the systems boundary - inside you can see how the actors interact with the system, its usually in oval shape and in side the action - you can record steps/ Dialogue between actor and system - has pre conditions and post conditions
There external events that happen with in the system
One point of view - should not be confused with a business process, described integrations only with the IT system
What relationships does a use case have
Extend and include - that one use case includes the functionality of another use case
Extend - Usually extends from a functionality of the another use case but can use a condition - such as when fuel tank is not fall/
Class diagram why and what features
Name, attributes and association
Customer or order
Attributes are like CustomerName OrderDate
Association are what class it is assiociated to like Customer car - Customer Owns car - customer can have one or more cars
CRUD matrix
Good for cross checking - Create Read update and delete
Class - Customer
Use Case - Takes payment
On the system the customer you recieve what the money
Class Account
Use Case - Take payment - The account is going to be updated by the payment
Stakeholder roles
Business - Project - External
Project - Sponsor, SME, Project Manager, Business Analst, Develpers, Testers
Business - Business architect, business regulators
External - Customers, suppliers, Governance, competitors
Validating requirements - Explain the process
So, you’re requirements will need to be validated by a sponsor - If there are any safty isssues or risks to budget and scope
In an agile development they tend to be less formal as you are working in iterative world, which means you can always go back to them.
In a waterfall and linear environment it tends to be more formal
Before formal you usually have a domain experts the sponsor the BA the project manager, the developers to review the requirements then during the meeting you would have a scribe, the requirements engineered and moderator
at the end you will have 3 options
Accept the catalogue in its current form, accept the change and say we will make the changes and trust the change or review the later again once changes have been made.
Explain the purpose of analysing requirements
Make sure the are unambiguous, clear and concise, they are testable and tracible - walkthrough with stakeholders and go round until completion
How would you prioritise requirements
MoSCoW - Traffic light system
Must have
Should have
Could have
Want to have
How would you interpret an individual requirement
Overlaps - Remove duplication
Make sure requirements are atomic, meaning they can do one item and not lots of things
Make sure it has a level priory and acceptance criteria
You want it to be unambiguous - Use a glossary - Clear simple language
Make sure its traceable, testable, correct and relevant - is it in scope
Feasibility study
Business, Tech and Financial
Tech - Is there tech already to perform requirement
Business - Are the proposal realistic
Financial - Is this change need - Sponsor makes final call
INVEST attribute to help with user stories
Independent - should stand out on its own
Negotiable - should be a basis for elaboration and prioritisation
Valuable - must add toward the business gaol
Estimable - In terms of size or development effort would take
Small
Testable
Why should we slice requirements agile/linear
So we do this through an interactive manner - So we can go through requirements at a high level and then go through again on a lower level
How to analyse business rules
With the business constraints we can use CRUD analyse the data constraints.
Decision constraints can be analysed via process models and BAMs
How we test testability
Need to make sure the requirements are testable, do we know the pre conditions of the test and post conditions, do we know the require response to expectations
Analyse roles
Personas, analyse the customer or business user from creating rules, use design thinking to empathises with the customer.
The customer role - Man in 70s
Persona - Man don’t know how to access his online shopping app
Persona goal
Stages - throughout the value chain
Touch points of how the customer interacts with the business
RGA - Customer perception
Emotional response -
Potential opportunities
What is the value change
Inbound logistics - Processes for receiving product
Production - turn these materials into something
Outbound logistics - Processes that get the product to the customer
Marketing - Processes on how we are to market the product, and how we sold the product
Customer service - the customer service we provide to the consumer once they have the product
Supportive activities - Infrustratre - so the over head management - the fiancés
Human resources - Hiring staff, training and development
Tech development - so how to market, product design
Procurment - how we procure out items with suppliers
traceability
vertical that it aligns with our objectives
horizontal - aligns back to the source and how and why a particular solution exists
How to deal with volatile requirements
They start off as voilatical and are likely to change but as we gain agreement from stakeholder we take them to a workshop involving the sponsor to validate and bassline the requirement so it become permeant and can only be changed by the change control process
Change control why would it happen and what to do about it
Change in stakeholdes, change in budget, competitor action,. change legistration.
You will have a formal meeting with the change control board - if the requirement is baselined.
Document analyse consult and decided whether to do the change or not
Change control board could be a senior user, a senior QA rep,
Whats the reason to baseline
They can never be overwritten, that are concrete requirements and validated and can only be changed via a control board, you can fall back on this requirement if the change was faulty
What’s the difference between business systems and IT systems
Business systems - are expressed as processes, sequence of tasks conducted by the roles to meet business requirements
IT systems - provides IT services to facilitate the business processes, to meet business goals
What’s the point in a process
It turns inputs into outputs to perform the work of the organisation - poor processes would lead to high costs, low customer satisfaction low moral and good processes will be the opposite
Why model a business process
look for problems, help with efficiency, satisfy a regulator, improve customer service, aids communication between us and the stakeholder
What’s the hierarchy of a business process
Enterprise level - Event response level and actor task level
Enterprise - Is a high level approach, that uses the value stream on how we get a product to market
Inbound, production, outbound, market and sales and customer service
Event response level - Understand how we react to a response, can be external, internal or time bound, we can do this by UML or BPMN
Actor Task - describes what the actor will be doing during that part of the process
What is the functional view
General management and then underneath you have the accounts team, production, sales and support
Internal perspective, little interest in customer.
What is process view
Process view flows through the functional view, its the process of how the company fulfil the order, going through all parts of the functional view
They create value to the customer
You can use SIPOC for a view of enterprise level, what is SIPOC
Suppliers, inbound, processes, outputs customer
Process elements
Swim lanes, you have Actors, events, decision points, timelines, tasks
Process element example
Customer wants to buy ticket
Trigger - Customer asks to buy ticket
Outcome - Customer has ticket to watch film
Actor - The box office staff
Business rule - Age range, do they have ID, VAT on ticket charging
Customer - Cinema
Explain the 3 levels again use the analogy of a cinema
Enterprise is the value chain,
Procure screen tickets, Make sure we have tickets in our system, have tickets availed to customers, promote track sales, customer service
Event response from track sale, Customer buys ticket - box office staff, check id if older enough sell ticket
In check ID you can have the tasks,
Process measurement
internal mesaures - look at the from a business point of view, how long did it take to this process - cost of rescourse the check avaibility
External measures are based on the customer - How long it actualy took them to get there product - qauility number of wrong errors given
How would you document steps in a task?
Simple text steps:
Actor opens types in ID to access registered
Actor finds film
Actor clicks on film
Or Use case
Actor - Takes payment
Goal - take payment for issues tickets,
Event - Customer asks to buy ticket
Pre condition - Box office staff must be present at desk
Post condition - The customer is in receipt of valid ticket
You can also have text do DOWHILE or DOIF
POPIT in Gap analysis
People - Structure
Organisation - Culture
Processes
New IT
Describe what is in POPIT
People - Management structure - Skills Motivation, Pay and benefits
Organisation - Standard - Policies management structure
Processes - Process models, actors, events, tasks , business rules
Information - Who we are going to capture Knowledge, data
Tech - Hardware, software.
How does POPIT help
The staff don’t have the skills to make the change
The change does not align to our policies as a company
The processes don’t do support our existing technology
Implement business change
Big change - Get rid of IT systems and implement new IT systems
Parallel - New processes run in parallel with the old
Pilot - A particular part of the business is chosen to test out the change
Phased - Next increment is only going to work once the new increment is proven
