BA Solutions Oral Exam Guidance Flashcards
Previous students experience of oral exam
What topics were you hoping not to come up today?
CRM experience.
Why is business analysis important and what benefits can it offer?
What BA does
Strategic
Tactical
Ad-hoc
Why needed
Driving change (IT/process/people/organisation)
Delivering benefits
Sell the role of a BA and and why they are required within a business to me
To drive change (IT/People/Process/Organisation)
To deliver benefits and maximise ROI on projects carried out
What skills does a BA need?
- Influence people
- Manage conflict
- Project Management
- Analyse and problem solve
- Creative and able generate ideas
- Act as liaison between business areas and IT, and deal with people of all different levels and job types
- Good communicators
- Good understanding of IT principles and current technology
- Good understanding of current business practice and techniques
- Good understanding of their business domain, and ideally of other business domains
- Good understanding of the legal and regulatory frameworks applicable to the business they are currently working in
- Act professionally and with integrity
You currently work for a not-for-profit organisation, do you feel the BA role would differ in
1) Private Sector
2) Public Sector
and if so, how?
Public Sector
The focus would be on delivering benefits to the budget, meaning the largest constraint would be financial.
Private Sector
The focus would be on achieving maximum ROI to tight timescales and competitiveness and brand image (customer satisfaction).
More analysis of project feasibility would likely take place before project commencement with more measurement of project success and emphasis on benefits realisation.
(Charity/Not For Project)
Focus on achieving aims.
What legal and regulatory framesworks exist in the company you work for and how do they affect your work?
-
Data Protection Act
Governs how long we can hold member information, what type of member information we can hold, how we can use information held and who has access to that information. -
FSA Regulations (Partner Recommenders)
Staff carrying out recommendations or involved in marketing recommended products and services have to be fully trained to the required FSA standards each year. Scripts for call centres need to be updated as any changes to the regulation occur. Systems have to be built to comply with FSA regulations. -
Disability and Discrimination Act
Leisure Retreat properties have to have disabled access and facilities or needs to be stated up front.
Website must be built to accommodate various font sizes for visually impaired people and be colour-blind friendly.
The working environment has to comply with a range of regulations as managed by HR.
What elements of the SWOT analysis are considered
1) External
2) Internal?
External
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
Internal
- Opportunities
- Threats
What is a Balanced Business Scorecard?
A mechanism to group KPIs under different headings to ensure their is a balanced view of measures.
How are CSFs and KPIs used in the BAM?
CSFs
- Plan
- Enable
- Do
KPIS
- Monitor
How does a business understand how well it is doing?
KPIs
Management and Financial Ratios
How do CSFs and KPIs relate?
CSFs generate KPIs.
What is the business change lifecycle?
ADDIR
Alignment (strategy, enivornment, architecture)
Definition
Design
Implementation
Realisation
What is the systems development lifecycle?
Process used to devlope an IS, training and user (stakeholder) ownership.
- Requirement Analysis,
- Design,
- Implementation,
- Testing
- Evolution
If you were a senior BA and your junior BAs had come up with 20 options for a business case, from where might they have obtained them?
From gap analysis.
What is a BAM?
A conceptual view representing a future view of the activities that need to be in place for the business perspective.
As part of building a conceptual model it is necessary to consider the events to which a business must respond. What three drivers are there of activities?
Internal
External
Time-based
What are business rules?
Contraints including regulatory, external, legal and business practices (policies and procedures).
How would you carry out gap analysis?
BPMN “As Is” and “To Be” process.
- current
- future
- potential actions for business improvements
What are the 4 main components of a business case?
- Executive Summary including recommendations
- Cost/Benefit Analysis
- Risks & Impact
- Options
If all the business cases put forward for projects break even financially at the same point, what would sell one over another?
Intangible benefits.
Stakeholder/staff impact.
Project risks.
What is a business case used for?
- Obtaining project budget
- To allow stakeholders to make choices
- Clarification of objectives and scope
- Monitoring benefit realisation
- Baseline of requirements via objectives
What does NPV not tell you?
Ongoing and intangible benefits.
What if there are some risks that cannot be eliminated, what can you do about them?
Insure them or, if the risk and impact is small, accept them.
What would you do with the business case when the project and budget is signed off?
Constantly review and update as required, obtaining sign-off for any amendments.
What should a BA do is a requirement, which is a ‘Must’ or ‘Should Have’, cannot be met?
Find a workaround.
At the end of a project, if we were looking for further potential projects from a review against objectives, how would we utilise the requirements gathered?
Look at the ‘Could Have’ and ‘Want To Have’ that haven’t already been delivered.
If you have 2 conflicting requirements, with no room for compromise, how would you resolve it?
- Check against business case objectives (scope).
- Workshop.
- Escalate to project sponsor.
What goes into a requirements catalogue?
- ID
- Description
- Acceptance criteria
- Source
- Owner
- Author
- Person recording
- Priority
- Version number
- Status/resolution
- Cross referencing (reqs/docs)
Describe a technique to model the processing of a system.
Use Case diagrams. (BPMN could also be used)
Why do you, as a BA, need to know about Data Models?
The data that is stored in IT systems is essential to the running of a business.
Having all the data stored in a structured way, and with each piece of data stored only once, enables the system/business to work more effectively, for example to generate the required reports to manage the business effectively.
Data Modelling ensures that the data is held according to business rules/needs and therefore is an important technique to be used by BAs.
A data model essentially means translating requirements at data level by using relations and entities.
What do the relationships on a Data Model show you?
Business Rules.
If I said “I don’t like BPMN’ why do you think that might be?
Potential lack of undestanding of stakeholders (too many symbols).
What would you do with your requirements once you’ve gathered them?
Create a requirements catalogue.
What process would you take if asked to provide the functionality to book appointments online for the NHS.
Find out what the requirements are through:
- Interviewing
- Workshops
- Shadowing
- Questionnaires
- Document Analysis
Re the NHS appointment booking process, how would you deal with change?
(A key stakeholder decided they wanted to allow patients to use the online service at home and on their phone).
Change Control (eliciation/analysis/validation/authorisation/documentation)
Managing expectations
Cost
Referring back to the business case (original objectives)
Testing
What are the advantages of being a Limtied vs Sole Trader?
Less personal risk.
In my day we just used to call it ‘Fact Finding’. Why do we now have Requirements Engineering?
Standardised quality approach desgined to ensure requirements are gathered with rigour and accuracy, documented accurately and monitored and controlled to ensure benefits are realised.
Why would a Project Sponsor be interested in Cost/Benefit Analysis?
ROI
As a BA hired on this project, where would you start?
Stakeholder analysis and requirements elicitation.
WWhat types of requirements are there, please elaborate with examples.
Functional, which is basically anything the system should do.
Non-Functional such a reliability, security levels, locations, volumes.
