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