BA General

Question 1

Q1. What would be few Key Qualities of a Business Analyst?

Answer 1

The BA must have confidence on his or her ability to provide solution for a complex problem, and ability to deal with all level of stakeholders. To gain these confidences the BA must have:

Business knowledge: The Business Analyst must have solid knowledge about the business domain that includes its products, customers, competitor, organisation structure, organisation process asset, goals and objectives, and organisation culture.

IT knowledge: The Business Analyst should understand what the company information systems can and cannot do. The person does not need to have a deep technical knowledge but should have some understanding of network, operating systems, hardware capabilities, database concepts, and the System Development Life Cycle and project methodology.

Interpersonal and communication skills: Since the person needs to effectively communicate with all level of stakeholders, the Business Analyst should be a great communicator and diligent team member, which include verbal, written communication as well as presentation skills.

Data collecting skills: The Business Analyst should know what data the company currently have, source of those data, business value of those data to analyse those data in order to make effective business analysis decisions.

Analytical and problem solving skills: The Business Analyst must have the ability analyse the feasibility of requirements in terms of business requirement, stakeholder requirement, solution scope, effort, time, and costs.

Ability to understand and document business processes: The Business Analyst should be able to recognize, analyse and map processes, model and improve business process and anticipate future state.

Question 2

Q. What is Business Analysis? How Business analysis help business?

Answer 2

Business analysis is the set of tasks and techniques require to perform in liaison with stakeholders in order to understand the strategy, process and operation of an organisation and recommend solutions that enable the organisation to achieve its goal.

Business analysis ensures the organisation achieves the best values for its investment as it analyses different alternatives for an initiative and recommend the optimal solution with some tangible data. Business analysis streamlines organisation business processes to make the organisation more efficient in everything it does by performing brainstorming, Lesson Learned process, SWOT, Root cause analysis, KPI etc. Business analysis facilitates communication among business stakeholder and technical stakeholder through requirement gathering and translating business and stakeholder requirements into system requirements.

Question 3

Q. How do you estimate development cost?

Answer 3

For an accurate estimation often I use WBS where project scopes are broken into smaller and smaller tasks. But for WBS you need lot of information readily available to you which is not always practical when estimation is needed for a business case. For business cases estimate, techniques such as Net present value, Average Rate of return, Cost –befit analysis, Payback period can be used. Then again it all depends on type of project or initiative. In addition to that there are few market standard estimating techniques available, these are Analogous estimation, parametric estimation, rolling wave, historic analysis.

Question 4

Q4. How do you usually go about solving a problem?

Answer 4

My first step would be identifying the source of the problem or business opportunity that solution I need to find. To do that, I need to identify stakeholders who will be affected by the solution, analysing the problem, studding relevant documents and engaging discussion with stakeholders.

The second step would be coming up with as many solutions as I can, and organising a brainstorming session with appropriate stakeholders to come up with more solutions to the problem.

The third step involves eliminating some of the solutions and ranking others based on IT infrastructure, complexity, usability, sustainability, futuristic, risk, size, time and cost and suitable resource.

The fourth steps would be communicating top two or three solutions with key stakeholders with relevant information to seek their opinion about those solutions.

Question 5

Q5.How do you organize and plan for major projects?

Answer 5

Almost every project I managed I had to prepare various plans for start to end of the project. Each plan included a set of procedures require to support that plan. These procedures will be governed by the organisation project management standard and project management methodology, also, size of the project and client type.

For instance, when I managed NAB project, there was a project manager form NAB end I was the project manager from client end. For that project I had to prepare:

• Communication plan
• Risk management plan
• Scheduling plan
• Change management plan
• QA Plan
• Resources management plan
• System development plan
• System acceptance plan

The communication plan included, how both parties will communicate, frequency of communion, method and location. The scheduling plan included project milestones and deliverables for each milestone, estimated time frame. And how WBS will be prepared, monitor and measured.

The change management plan included what constitutes a change, bug or new development. How changes will be assessed, scheduled and implemented including both parties responsibilities on this regard. The quality assurance plan included how the system’s usability, reliability and performance will be measured as well as each party’s responsibilities such as UAT.

The system development plan included, technology and platform, resources management, which team would be responsible for what deliverables. releases, data migration, staging etc.

The system acceptance plan included a set of documents needed to be signed off, the process of singing of those documents.

Question 6

Q. How do you deal with difficult stakeholders?

Answer 6

To deal with difficult Stakeholders I practice active listing and try to put myself into the other person shoes, and I never feel hesitate to say sorry. I engage with constructive discussion, I talk with logic, respect, examples, and avoid provocation.

There will always be a reason why stakeholder is difficult. This could be stakeholder seeing a requirement in different perspective due to past expertise. Reason could be stakeholder assumption that the solution should have a certain capability that is outside the scope of an approved requirement. Conflict also can arise due to conflicting priority. The key to manage difficult stakeholder is, understanding of the underlying reason that made the person difficult. Once that reason is established, it can be addressed by proper dialog and discussion, preparing a prototype or by conducting research or, getting third party involve if required.

Question 7

Q. Give an example of an occasion when you used logic to solve a problem.

Answer 7

Soon after joining XYZ in 2010, I noticed that there were lot of confusions and disagreements among BA and Development teams about the development cost and time estimation. Because XYZ charges its customers for development, inaccurate estimations were having adverse effects on various sections of XYX as well as it customers.

As such, I took an initiative to design and document a Decision Support System that can be used to accurately estimate the cost and afford will require developing a new feature. The solution required inclusion of some additional fields in the project management system to capture some Meta data about tasks, for example is the task is related to report writing, degree of complexity etc. Also a user interface for the user to input some data related the development that needs to be estimated. System then compares the new task with historical data from the past projects and provides estimations for best case scenario, most like outcome and worst case scenario.

To start I prepared a conceptual model using spreadsheet and gave a demo to some key stakeholders. Although they were not fully convinced whether the approach will work but approved an in-house development for the system. Once developed, the first six months the system was not much useful due to lack of quality data, but after that it started to produce some meaningful estimation. It presents the system is must use for entire organisation when comes to estimating a development cost. It is efficient and quite accurate. The system has been and will provide a wonderful service to the organisation for many years to come

Question 8

Q8. When you worked on multiple projects how did you prioritize?

Answer 8

I normally arrive at work around quarter past 7, I spend first hour reading email and organising my activities for the day. Early in the morning the office will be nice and quiet, free from any distraction which I need to plan for a productive day.

Along with Outlook task and project management system. I maintain a separate spreadsheet that contains my tasks list with priority in terms of business need, release plan, risk, time, agreement with stakeholders, relationship with other task and dependency. Also when a team requires my work that task would have higher priory then individual’s requirement. I closely monitor and update the spreadsheet to synchronise its list with my outlook tasks and project management WBS. I also communicate with my manager or affected stakeholder when a task priority changes. I closely monitor projects related activities and use my experience and judgement and commitment to prioritise task.

Question 9

Q. How do you handle meeting a tight deadline?

Answer 9

Meeting strict or tight deadlines are quite frequent at my current work. This is not because of my manager but more often the commitments that I would have with external clients. To meet tight deadline I have a simple approach that work for me.

First I plan, in which I break down my tasks for each working hour and define an anticipated output for that hour. This helps me to estimate the time and effort will require to meet the given deadline. After that I work intensely; avoid anything that will hamper my progress. I try to remain calm as much as possible and monitor my progress hourly bases. If I see I am behind, I will work extra hours to catch up with my plan. Try to not leave today’s task for tomorrow.

So my secret to meet tight deadline is stay focus, work intensely, monitor progress, and work longer hours if required.

Question 10

Q. Describe a situation when you were unable to deliver one of your requirements documents on time. What did you do?

Answer 10

I would inform the recipient as early as possible about the delay with some creditable reasons of curse. I will apologise for the inconvenient. I will inform the person about the new delivery date.

Question 11

Q. Tell us about a time when you needed to gain approval for one of your business requirements documents but a stakeholder kept on delaying or postponing meeting with you.

Answer 11

This happened to me number of occasions. For this type of situations, I follow a simple process. If I find the stakeholder has valid reasons then I wait as long as I can, but when I feel other may be affected due to the delay, I send an email to the stakeholder explaining what affect the project or team will have due to delaying the approval. If I don’t hear from the stakeholder within a day, I send another email advising that if I don’t receive the approval by certain time or day, I would consider the requirement is approved by the stakeholder. And the last email works like a magic.

Question 12

Q. As a business analyst, describe your ideal project environment.

Answer 12

I prefer a project environment where policy, processes and methodologies are well defined and followed. Also encourages project members to suggest room for improvement. I prefer a hardworking but balance environment, where all members are fully aware of what the project expects from them. I prefer an environment which fosters collaboration through human interactions as well as technology.

Question 13

Q13. Describe a time when you introduced a new idea or process into a project or department and how it improved the process or situation.

Answer 13

Once I joined XYZ, I noticed both the development and QA teams often miss the organisation standard for development, particularly standards related to user interfaces. These were causing inconstant looks and behavers within the system. I realised that the reason behind this issue is, some don’t have the full understanding of the development standard as it is a rather large document, and other simply don’t take the standard seriously.

I also realised that if somehow the developers and Quality assurance personals are obliged to go through with the standard document frequently then the problem could be reduced if not eliminated. As such, I designed a web based checklist which includes 28 items to summarise the current development standard for the development and QA team to complete and submit each time they update their task status completed in project management system.

I put the proposal and checklist to the product manager and some key stakeholders, after three months of negotiation the proposal was implemented just for the QA team and a matrix has been setup to monitor improvement of development team in this regards. Outcome that matrix will define whether the development team will also require to submit the checklist or not.

Question 14

Q14. Describe a time when you had to facilitate a requirements gathering activity where your stakeholders were not located in the same city. If you haven’t done this before, describe to us how you will deal with this type of situation.

Answer 14

Most of XYZ clients head offices are located outside Sydney. Therefore I often require to travel interstate to gather requirements. It is also common that stakeholders from the same client are located in multiple cities. In situation like this, I set up a discussion group in our online project management system where I will give relevant stakeholders access to add or update requirement, ideas and concerns. Any addition or modification will send notification emails to all stakeholders in the group. I use this as a vehicle to collaborate and communicate with stakeholders fairly effectively, particularly when stakeholders are located in different geographical locations.

In addition, I use tele conference, share my screen with stakeholders using remote support system for clarification and confirmation, I travel frequently to run workshop or where I feel face to face meeting is required.

Question 15

Q. What steps do you take to come up with innovative solution?

Answer 15

My first step would be identifying the source of the problem or business opportunity that solution I need to find. To do that, I need to identify stakeholders who will be affected by the solution, analysing the problem, studding relevant documents and engaging discussion with stakeholders.

The second step would be coming up with as many solutions as I can, and organising a brainstorming session with appropriate stakeholders to come up with more solutions to the problem.

The third step involves eliminating some of the solutions and ranking others based on IT infrastructure, complexity, usability, sustainability, futuristic, risk, size, time and cost and suitable resource.

The fourth steps would be communicating top two or three solutions with key stakeholders with relevant information to seek their opinion about those solutions.

The fifth step would evaluate stakeholders’ opinions and suggestions and recommend the best one.

Question 16

Q16. If two companies are merging, explain what tasks you would implement to make the merge successful, and how you would implement those tasks.

Answer 16

The first I will analyse the goal and objectives of the merger. For example, the goal could be become very profitable and objectives would be eliminating duplicate or redundant tasks, automate manual work. Then I will analysis both organisation resources and capabilities to find out how I will be able to utilise these resources to archive the desired outcome, or new projects will be required to develop the required capabilities. I will identify what approach can be taken, what data need to be migrated, which systems need to be decommission, what type training will be required, stakeholders who will be positively or negatively affected, what are within the scope and outside the scope. I will prepare few business cases to launch few new projects and once projects are approved and start I will perform relevant business analysis activates for successful implementation of those projects.

Question 17

Q. Describe the project or situation which best demonstrates your analytical abilities. What was your role?

Answer 17

To answer this question, I will details the forecasting system that IT Magnet developed for Nestlé Australia, for which I led the Business Analysis team that enabled IT Magnet to successfully design and implement a complex and challenging project.

In 2007 Nestlé engaged IT Magnet as a third party consultant design a conceptual model a forecasting system that would meet individual division’s forecasting needs, and would also have the potential to be implemented within the given budget. For IT Magnet this was a challenging project, but it was lucrative enough for the company to proceed.

In this project, I led two other Business Analysts, where our responsibilities included understanding the organisation’s business model and existing systems, gathering business requirements, analysing existing problems, developing solutions to those problems, and selling our solutions to the key stakeholders including Nestlé’s CTO and CEO. During the design phase I had to communicate all levels of stakeholders starting from Sales people, department manager, IT operations manager, application manager, Head of IT, as well as external such as Woolworths.

Forecasting is a complex task, It requires data from various internal and external sources, and the quality of this data is critical to its ability to produce accurate and desired outputs. Nestlé Australia’s forecasting system required data from six different internal systems and a number of external systems, for example, the Bureau of Meteorology to predict rainfall in Gippsland, Victoria where the majority of Nestlé’s dairy farms are located. Tools were needed to be developed to refine and re-refine data from these internal and external systems. Technical specification documents for these tools had to be written in such a way so they catered to technical as well as non-technical stakeholders. The standard of the technical specification had to be of the highest level, as it would be reviewed by organisation’s external stakeholders such as Woolworths. Most importantly, specifications were required to be presented in a manner that would

Question 18

Q. Give a specific example of a time when you used good judgment and login in solving a problem.

Answer 18

February this year, the product manager informed me that the Sales would like to participate in a government tender but our product currently doesn’t have a module that is pre requisite for the tender. She asked me what we can do about that.

The module is about the ability to track employee location is using GPRS technology on a digital map and the ability to identify the most suitable employee for a job using employee location, client location, client preferences and employee’s skills set.

On that day I spent few hours to analysis the stated requirements and manage to document some capability statements to outline the required enhancements to the system that will support those requirements. These statements were included into the tender submission.

In May, the product manager called me to her room and informed me that we had been sort listed for the tender which will require sales team to give the product demo to some key decision makers and a conceptual model of mobile workforce module needs to be included in that presentation. She requested me come up with a solution.

To illustrate what actual implementation will look like, I worked next three days to create 8 to 9 mock-up user interfaces as close as possible to the actual look and feel using Photoshop and Microsoft Visio. These user interfaces were included in the presentation and we secured the tender.

Later I learned that the screens that were presented hold far more advance capabilities than what two other commentators currently have and my solution for the Mobile Workforce management module played an important role securing the tender. My last performance review I was able to use this success to increase my salary.

Question 19

Q. Give me an example of when you took a risk to achieve a goal. What was the outcome?

Answer 19

After joining E-tivity, I noticed that the organisation doesn’t have a document management system. Documents are kept in different servers in different folder structure and fairly unorganised manner. So I took initiative and prepared a business case for a document management system and managed to convince by manager to submit the business case to the board for funding approval. However, the board did not approve the funding due to their doubt about the cost benefit analysis that I included in the proposal.

After that I lobbied my case with few other colleagues to assure the board that my cost benefit analysis is accurate and managed to approve funding for the project in eight months later. As a new employee, it was a risky approach to approach others to get involved in this matter. Nevertheless I did and managed to achieve results.

Question 20

Q20. Tell us about a time when you had to analyse information and make a recommendation. What kind of thought process did you go through? What was your reasoning behind your decision?

Answer 20

February this year I became involved in a project to replace E-tivity’s then helpdesk system called Gemini. Initially the Infrastructure department selected a system called Ramadi to replace Gemini with the estimated cost of 90K once off and 12k annual fees. However they were told to come up with a business case to justify the cost, that’s when I got assigned to the task to prepare the business case for the project.

To stat, I meet Infrastructure department head Danijel Plazonic and asked him two questions why have we decided to replace Gemini, and whey did Infrastructure select Ramadi. I immutably notice that Danijel is not happy that management asked for a business case, he thinks whole exercise is a waste of his and my time. Nevertheless he informed me that we need to replace Gamini because E-tivity has decided to expand its operation in US, UK and India, therefore Infrastructure needs a system that can support its global operation in 24*7. And Danijel selected Ramidi because he used that system at his previous work and fully aware of its capabilities.

I then spent couple of days to identify and documenting features in Ramidi and spoke to couple of friends who use Ramid in their organisation. I documented Ramidi features in a spreadsheet where I used a worksheet for each module and a column to describe functions, another column to select whether the function is essential, Desirae or not needed and a column to comment on if the function is essential or desirable.

I sent the spreadsheet to Danijel with request to select an item from the second column and type comment in third column where he feels necessary. After three follow-ups and three weeks later I received the updated version.

In my business case I included Ramid and other two products, one of the product was Kayaoko, which has all the functions Danijel requires cost of $3K once of and $500 annual subscription fees. If needed the vendor will do any developments require integrating with our internal system at $60 an hour. Their system is used by Toshibal, GE finance and even NASA. In May we all received an email from Infrastructure that project to replace Gemini with Kayako will start soon.

I saved XYZ $87K and $7.5k each year

Question 21

Q. Tell me about a time when you had to analyze detailed numeric or financial information. What were you

Answer 21

My current company XYZ owns an enterprise Human Resource and Workforce management system called XYZ enterprise. It is a large and complex system. A single implementation of XYZ enterprise can provide HR related information to organisation entire operations including its global operations. The system mainly deals with employees pay and entitlements.

Recently I designed and documented an interactive dashboard for the system to replace its existing dashboard. As you know that the primary purpose of a dashboard to display financial and numerical data in graphs, charts and table format. To design that dashboard I required to analysis, verify and validate date using spreadsheet, VBA macro, SQL queries. I had to drill down to the source of the data to final output

Also, often I design reports for the system. This requires to me analysis financial and numerical data in depth level to ensure the report proceeds accurate output.

Question 22

Q. Describe a complicated problem that you have had to solve at work. What did you identify as potential causes and solutions?

Answer 22

XYZ recently initiated a project to develop a module to allow end users to design their own reports. At present, users are limited to use reports that come with the system. My initial involvement was to prepare a business case for the project.

At the beginning, I thought this is just any other business case. However, once I started, I immediately encountered three hurdles. First, there are no decent web based report creating tool that will allow the end users to design report layout through drag and drop. One or two offer web base solution but obscure company and unreasonable licensing cost. Most report design tolls are PC based, you need to install the tool to user PC to design report and then upload design files on the E-tivity server to run report.

The second challenge was, to design a report; the user needs to have some understanding of E-tivity’s database structure, which is not an easy task even for an expert user. The last challenge was related to data access. Since the XYZ is an enterprise system, which data and whose data the user will be able to view are subject to user position in the organisation hierarchy. Therefore, user design reports need to display data based on system security and user positon.

After three weeks of complex thinking, R&D, analysis and discussion I managed to provide solutions for all three problems and submitted my business case. This project is currently in XYZ’s pipeline for development.

Question 23

Q23. When are you done with requirements?

Answer 23

First, I log the requirement in our requirement management system with some attributes, such as who requested, requested date, department, priority etc. At the same time I may choose to link the requirement with business objective, other requirement etc. I will analyse the requirement and communicate my analysis to relevant stakeholders and seek approval of the solution that I have come up with. Once approved I will baseline the requirement, from then on any changes to the requirement will have to go through internal change management system.

Question 24

Q. Tell me about your typical approach to a project.

Answer 24

First I try to understand type of initiative, such as large or small. Then what type of client, large or small, formal, informal etc. Based on these two information, I decide what type of deliverables BAs need to produce. I plan business analysis activities for the project and then discuss my plan with my colleagues. I then verify my plan with the project manager and adhere to plan unless the project circumstances change.

Question 25

Q. What action will you take if you are assigned to a task unexpectedly when you middle of competing an important task?

Answer 25

I encounter this type of situation quite often, and I follow the same process I generally follow to prioritise my tasks or requirements for release.

I will compare the competing tasks by asking three questions:

• Which task is currently causing the most adverse impacts and quantify those impacts. Such as loss of revenue, loss of working hours, customer desertification.
• Completion of which task will bring the most benefit to the organisation
• How much time will take to complete the newly assigned task compare to my existing task

Based on these assessments, will decide whether to start the newly assigned task or to inform the assignee why I think the task should wait.