Needs Assessment Flashcards
You have been asked to initiate a new software development project. Since the project requirements are not clear, you and the project team believe that the project will benefit from an adaptive lifecycle. The project sponsor has asked you to document the high-level scope of the project. What should you do next?
Develop detailed system use cases.
Initiate the development of the project’s scope statement.
Identify the user epics.
Tell the project sponsor that a high-level scope cannot be determined at this stage.
Identify the user epics.
Adaptive projects often create a brief statement of project intent which states the business objectives, value propositions, benefits, goals, and milestones, etc. It may also include very high-level user epics that are later broken down into user stories. At this stage, you need to identify the user epics that comprise the project scope. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 62]
The director of human resources in your organization has expressed her interest in implementing a new employee attendance system. The new attendance system should utilize facial recognition technologies to detect and record the employee sign-in and sign-off times. This would replace the current card tap-in and tap-off system the organization has been using for some time. You are also aware that the new organizational strategy encourages, “working from home” and is targeting to have at least 50% of the employees working from home at any given point in time. In your opinion, what is the problem with the HR director’s project idea?
It doesn’t have any cost benefits for the organization.
Facial recognition technologies are not matured enough to be deployed.
It doesn’t align with the organizational strategy.
The HR director has failed to consider other biometric technologies.
It doesn’t align with the organizational strategy.
You need to spot the problem based on the given information. We know that the organization plans to encourage employees to work from home and have less workforce at work. The HR director’s project idea is clearly not aligned with the organizational strategy. As part of business analysis, we ensure that all initiatives are aligned with the organizational strategy and objectives. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 57]
You are currently collecting and documenting requirements for a new organizational workflow that needs to be digitized. You quickly learn that the stakeholders are struggling with articulating their true requirements and one way to overcome this is to develop a model UI interface and solicit their feedback. Once the models are agreed upon, these can be used as inputs for the system development. This technique is known as:
Focus groups
Design before build
Simulation
Prototyping
Prototyping
Prototyping is a method of obtaining early feedback on requirements by providing a model of the expected solution before building it. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 61]
You are analyzing a business to identify business improvement opportunities. Once you collected the operational data, you found out there are a number of improvement opportunities. You want to conduct a cost benefit analysis and perform 80/20 analysis of the opportunities. Which of the following tools will help you in this matter?
Five Whys
Pareto diagram
Fishbone diagram
Scatter diagram
Pareto diagram
A Pareto diagram helps demonstrate the 80/20 principle whereby 80% of the problems can be related back to 20% of the causes. Fishbone diagrams and Five Whys analysis are root cause analysis techniques, which might be helpful in analyzing the opportunities further. However, since the question is asking you to identify the tool that would help you with the 80/20 analysis, the correct answer is Pareto diagram. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 69]
You have scheduled a stakeholder workshop to discuss how the business manages its sales pipeline and who does what in the overall sales pipeline. The aim is to understand the as-is situation so that this could later be digitized. You have collected some information around this and want to present your findings to the group so that it can be further refined. Which of the following tools should you use during the workshop to present this information to the stakeholders?
Pareto diagram
Tornado diagram
Ishikawa diagram
Process flow diagram
Process flow diagram
Process flows describe business processes and the ways stakeholders interact with those processes. Process flows can be used to document current as-is processes of the business. The rest of the choices are not applicable to the context of the scenario. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 70]
A new organizational direction has been set by the CEO of your organization. As a result, a new organizational strategy has been developed by the executive team. You have been tasked to analyze the strategy and compare it with the current organizational capabilities and identify the current strengths and weaknesses of the organization. The outputs of your analysis will then be used to identify new projects your organization should initiate. Which of the following tools would help you conduct this analysis?
Five Forces Analysis
PERT Analysis
SWOT Analysis
PESTLE Analysis
SWOT Analysis
Porter’s Five Forces and PESTLE analysis are used to analyze the competitive environment within an industry, while a SWOT analysis tends to look more deeply within an organization to analyze its internal potential. SWOT analysis is used to assess organization’s strategy, goals, and objectives and to facilitate discussions with stakeholders when discussing high-level and important aspects of an organization. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 72]
You are currently analyzing the list of reported defects in a recently released product. You have grouped these defects into categories and now want to conduct a detailed root-cause analysis. Which of the following techniques will help you conduct this analysis?
Leads and lags
SIPOC
Process Flow
Five Whys
Five Whys
Five Whys is a technique that suggests anyone trying to understand a problem needs to ask why it is occurring up to five times in order to thoroughly understand the problem’s causes. The rest of the choices are not valid root-cause analysis techniques. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 72]
You are currently conducting a workshop where stakeholders have proposed a number of ideas that can be implemented to improve the operations of a business unit. You want the group to help you categorize these ideas into more manageable clusters. Which of the following techniques should you apply?
Pareto diagram
Box plots
Use case diagram
Affinity diagram
Affinity diagram
Affinity diagrams are used to process a large set of information or ideas into a manageable set of data organized by categories. The rest of the choices aren’t fit for this purpose. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 77]
Your organization is a regional water distribution company. So far, the organization has enjoyed a monopoly. The new managing director wants the business to get into the bottled water market. Since there are a number of players already in the bottled water market, the organization’s current sales and marketing processes and procedures might not be fit for the new competition. In order to compare the organization’s current processes with that of the competitors’, you need to utilize which of the following techniques?
Digitization
Benchmarking
SWOT analysis
PEST analysis
Benchmarking
Benchmarking is a comparison technique used to compare one set of practices, processes, and measurements of results against another. This technique provides a way to determine new capabilities by conducting a comparison against benchmarking studies of external organizations. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 78]
Your project team has recently been authorized to develop a next-generation technology gadget. You have collected several features for this product and are currently in the process of shortlisting these for the development. Which of the following tools can help you analyze these features from the viewpoint of the customer?
Kano Analysis
Six Sigma analysis
Anova analysis
Ishikawa analysis
Kano Analysis
Kano analysis is a technique used to model and analyze product features by considering the features from the viewpoint of the customer. None of the rest of the choices could help you with this analysis. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 79]
You are leading a software development project and following an adaptive delivery model. There are a number of product-related decisions that the team needs to make. You have recommended delaying all decision-making until as late as possible so that the team may get more time to discover and improve its knowledge base. Which of the following is a decision-making thought process you have recommended?
Dictatorship
Real options
Affinity diagram
80/20 rule
Real options
Real options is a decision-making thought process that can be used on projects that follow an adaptive delivery model. Two fundamental principles are applied to decision making with real options. The first is to reduce the number of decisions that need to be made in the short term, and the second is to delay all decision making until as late as possible. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 89]
You are analyzing a business problem and comparing two alternative solutions that could address the problem. Both solutions have comparable pros and cons. You now want to do a financial comparison of the options taking into account the total cost of ownership. Option A has an IRR of 4% while the option B has an IRR of 8%. Which option should be selected if the decision is to be made on the basis of IRR calculation?
Option A
Option B
Both options are equally favorable
Neither; both options are not favorable.
Option B
Option B needs to be selected as it has a higher IRR value. IRR is a measure of return to cost; therefore, the higher the IRR, the higher the return a solution option is expected to deliver. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 90]
Your organization is considering two capital projects. Although both projects address some key business needs, due to funding limitations, only one project can be initiated at this stage. The organization’s total budget for capital projects is $100,000. Project A has an NPV value of $50,000 while project B has an NPV value of $25,000. Which project will you select and why?
Project B; since its NPV value is lower than project A’s NPV value.
Project A; since its NPV value is higher than project B’s NPV value.
Both projects need to be selected as they fall under the organization’s budget.
Neither of the projects need to be selected as neither meets the $100,000 target.
Project A; since its NPV value is higher than project B’s NPV value.
The higher the NPV, then greater the amount of value an option is expected to provide. Hence, if the organization has to choose one between these two projects, project A must be selected. Note that NPV value is not the cost to execute the projects; it is the future value of expected benefits expressed in the value that those benefits have at the time of investment. The organization’s capital budget is irrelevant to this question. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 90]
Your organization is considering investing in an ERP solution. It will take two years to build the system using in-house resources. The total upfront cost is $1,000,000. It is expected that if the solution is implemented, it will decrease the operational costs by $100,000 by the end of each operational year. The system is expected to be in operation for at least 15 years. What is the payback period of the investment?
2 years
15 years
12 years
10 years
12 years
The payback period is the time needed to recover an investment. For this scenario, the payback period is 12 years; 2 years of development time + 10 years to recover the initial investment. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 90]
Your organization wants to implement a new workflow management system. You can either have this system developed in-house (option A) or you can acquire this from a vendor (option B). Option A has an NPV of $100,000 and a payback period of five years, while the option B has an NPV of $85,000 and a payback period of two years. If the management’s risk tolerance is low, which option will you select?
Option A since the NPV is $100,000
Option B since the payback period is two years
Option B since the NPV is $85,000
Option A since the payback period is five years
Option B since the payback period is two years
If you disregard the risk, option A is more favorable as it has a higher NPV. However, since the management’s risk tolerance is low, option B must be selected as its payback period is shorter. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 90]
