PMI-PBA Mock Exam Lite - 10

Question 1

Your project’s scope was earlier represented by epics. However, these have now been replaced with user stories. What is the relationship between epics and user stories?

Answer 1

Subsets

Discretionary dependency is a concept in project scheduling; this dependency exists between project tasks and not product requirements. The rest of the choices are all valid product requirements relationship types. Epics are broken down into smaller user stories, hence the relationship between them is “subsets”. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 259]

Question 2

An Agile team is struggling with coordinating work in progress. This is causing unnecessary conflicts and delays on the project. Which of the following two techniques can help this situation?

Answer 2

Kanban boards and daily stand-ups

Help the team learn that they self-manage their work. Consider Kanban boards to see the flow of work. Consider a daily stand-up to walk the board and see what work is where. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 144, 233, 244]

Question 3

Your construction project is in execution, and you require a major change to one of your supplier agreements. Can you directly make this change with mutual consent of the supplier during the Control Procurements process, or do you have to visit the Perform Integrated Change Control process, as well?

Answer 3

The change request needs to be approved through the Perform Integrated Change Control process prior to making the change through the Control Procurements process.

The change request needs to be approved through the Perform Integrated Change Control process prior to making the change through the Control Procurements process. Approved change requests from the Perform Integrated Change control process are inputs of the Control Procurements process. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, Page 493]

Question 4

You have recently been hired into a manufacturing facility and your job is to increase project management awareness and introduce project management best practices into the business. You currently are introducing the Validate Scope process to project teams who have historically relied solely on quality control processes for the quality management of the produced deliverables. The key difference between Validate Scope and Control Quality is:

Answer 4

Validate Scope is concerned with the acceptance of deliverables.

Validate Scope differs from Control Quality in that Validate Scope is primarily concerned with the acceptance of the deliverables, whereas Control Quality is primarily concerned with meeting the quality requirements specified for the deliverables. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, Page 131]

Question 5

You have gathered all relevant product requirements for your project. The next step is to get a quality review done by an assurance team to ensure that the product requirements adhere to organizational quality standards. This review is an example of:

Answer 5

Verify requirements

Verify requirements is the process of checking that requirements are of sufficient quality. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 221]

Question 6

When defining the requirements change control process for any project, regardless of the project lifecycle, which of the following should be least of your concern?

Answer 6

The scope of the project

The scope of the project should be of your least concern during the design of a change control process. The rest of the choices are all valid considerations for the design of this process. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 255]

Question 7

You have completed all planned product requirement elicitation activities and are currently analyzing the results. You find out there are several uncertainties associated with the product requirements. An uncertainty that can affect success in definition, development, and expected results of the product or solution is called:

Answer 7

Product risk

Product risk is an uncertainty that can affect success in definition, development, and expected results of the product or solution. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 406]

Question 8

You are leading a cross-functional process digitization project using Agile product development methods. The project sponsor has requested the minimum viable product to be the first project release. Which of the following features would you select for your first release?

Answer 8

The fewest number of features that would constitute a solution that the customer would accept.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a prioritization mechanism to define the scope of the first release of a solution to customers by identifying the fewest number of features or requirements that would constitute a solution that the customer would obtain value from. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 401]

Question 9

While managing a project, you have included the product acceptance criteria in the Quality Management Plan. While reviewing your plan, a senior manager asks you to reconsider this. You then realize that what you did is incorrect. Where should you place the product acceptance criteria?

Answer 9

Project Scope Statement

The project scope statement documents and addresses the characteristics and boundaries of the project and its associated products and services, as well as product acceptance criteria and scope control. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, Page 154]

Question 10

You are leading a complex software development project. Due to the complexity of the project, stakeholders are not able to clearly articulate the product requirements. The team has decided to use Agile methods to manage this project. The team has selected a few epics for the first sprint and broken them down into smaller and more manageable stories. The management needs some visibility over the product development efforts. Which of the following tools should you use?

Answer 10

Burndown charts

A burndown chart is a graphical representation used to count the remaining quantity of some trackable aspect of a project over time, such as user stories. The rest of the tools are not capable of showing progress over time. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 131]

Question 11

You have recently been hired by an organization to help them mature their business analysis processes. You have learned that few months ago a consultant introduced the PMI Guide to Business Analysis to the organization. The organization is now applying all PMI Guide’s processes consistently to all projects. You are now helping the organization understand that business analysis involves selecting the appropriate business analysis processes, tools, techniques, inputs, and outputs for use on each project. The PMI’s terminology for this selection is called:

Answer 11

Tailoring

PMI calls this tailoring business analysis. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 25]

Question 12

You are the business analyst on a new product development project. You have completed all product requirements elicitation activities and recently developed an entity relationship diagram for the product. Which of the following artifacts should you send to the database designer alongside the ERD so that she can start designing the database for the product?

Answer 12

CRUD matrix

CRUD, defined as create (C), read (R), update (U), and delete (D), represents the operations that can be applied to data or objects. CRUD matrices describe who or what has permission to perform each of the CRUD operations on elements, such as data or user interface screens. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 197]

Question 13

You conducted a requirements approval workshop with the key stakeholders. Most of the requirements were approved by all stakeholders without any disagreements. However, there was one particular requirement that attracted a lot of debate. Voting was carried out to the resolve the matter and the following results were obtained: 45% of the stakeholders approved the requirement, 40% rejected the requirement, while 5% said they were indifferent. Based on this result, you decided to consider the requirement approved. What group decision-making technique was used?

Answer 13

Plurality

Majority is reached when more than 50% of people are in support of an outcome. Plurality is obtained by the taking the most common answer received from the decision makers; the number of votes are more than any other but does not receive a majority. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 267]

Question 14

Visual communication is the transmission of information and ideas using graphics. This is generally considered to be more powerful than verbal communication. Due to this reason, you have decided to use proof of concepts (PoC) to elicit high-level product requirements from your stakeholders. Proof of concept is an example of:

Answer 14

Prototyping

Group decision-making techniques, brainstorming and multi-voting techniques do not involve any visual communication approach. Prototyping uses models that provide a visual representation of what may eventually evolve into a product’s design. Prototypes are also known as proofs of concept (PoC). [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 168]

Question 15

Your organization has recently released a product into the market and has collected customer feedback through surveys. You are now reviewing these results and using a Kano model to analyze the product’s features. Which product features will you classify as “indifferent features”?

Answer 15

The features that neither satisfied nor dissatisfied the customers.

The indifferent features are the ones that neither satisfied nor dissatisfied the customers. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 80]

Question 16

Your organization has initiated multiple projects during the current financial year and most of the projects are now struggling due to insufficient human resources available to execute all projects at the same time. As a seasoned project management professional, how would you advise the management to handle this issue?

Answer 16

Prioritize the projects based on business value and resource availability.

Projects compete for resources and the solution to this problem is prioritization. However, project prioritization is not always dependent on ROI (e.g., for some projects the ROI calculation is difficult due to intangible benefits). It is recommended to prioritize the projects based on business value. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, page 7]

Question 17

You are conducting a post-implementation solution evaluation of a recently released IT system. Which of the following documents will you use during this evaluation as an authoritative source to identify the expected product benefits?

Answer 17

Business case

The business case describes pertinent information to determine whether the initiative is worth the required investment. It is an authoritative source where expected benefits have been stated. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 281]

Question 18

Verification is the process of reviewing the requirements and other product information for errors, conflicts, and adherence to quality standards. Adaptive projects typically benefit from the INVEST technique to verify user stories during this process. When verifying user stories, what are the focus areas of this technique?

Answer 18

Independence, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, and Testable

INVEST is an acronym for Independence, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small and Testable. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 223]

Question 19

Your organization is currently trying Agile methods and focusing on reducing project documentation. In the absence of a formal business case, particularly on smaller projects, which of the following artifacts can be used to initiate the project?

Answer 19

Project charter

Not all business problems or opportunities require a formal business case. In the absence of a formal business case, a project charter can be used to initiate a project. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 98]

Question 20

You are currently conducting a workshop on business analysis and helping some new recruits come to speed with organizational business analysis practices. You have been asked which of the following type of requirements are not considered to be product requirements?

Answer 20

Project requirements

Project and project quality requirements are not part of the business analysis effort and are not considered to be product requirements. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 10]

Question 21

You are conducting the Solution Evaluation activities for a major release of your project. You are not satisfied by the quality of the release and after analyzing the acceptance testing results, you have decided to hold the release. During which of the following business analysis processes are such decisions typically made?

Answer 21

Obtain Solution Acceptance for Release.

Obtain Solution Acceptance for Release is the process of facilitating a decision on whether to release a partial or full solution into production and eventually to an operational team. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 294]

Question 22

You are conducting a post-implementation solution evaluation of a system. As an input to this exercise, you need to gather performance data. When would you collect system performance data for this exercise?

Answer 22

Performance data before and after the release

Performance data are used to determine the actual business value of a product by assessing the performance data before and after a release. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 282]

Question 23

You are leading the business analysis activities for a complex process automation project in your organization. Due to the complexity of the project, you have creatively planned the elicitation and the analysis activities. How would you determine that your elicitation activities have been completed?

Answer 23

When the team does not need any further information or clarification from the stakeholders.

For complex projects, where progressive elaboration is required, elicitation is performed iteratively with analysis, and this is done throughout the project lifecycle. However, you can consider your elicitation activities completed at a point in time when the team does not need any further information or clarification from the stakeholders. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 155]

Question 24

Which of these is not a component of the scope baseline that is contained in the project management plan?

Answer 24

Requirements documentation

Project requirements documentation is used as an input to define the project’s scope baseline. However, the requirements documentation is not a part of the scope baseline. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, Page 161]

Question 25

Your organization initiated a major transformation project two years ago that failed to deliver the required business value. You have been assigned to investigate this project and identify the root cause of this failure. The review of the acceptance testing results disclosed that the product requirements were not adequately prioritized before the development started. Which of the following project documents should you review next to review the product’s requirements prioritization criteria?

Answer 25

The business analysis plan

When building the business analysis plan, the business analyst should include an explanation as to how prioritization will be conducted for the project. You should review the business analysis plan to determine the product’s requirements prioritization criteria. [Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide, page 55; The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 127]

Question 26

Which of the following is Deming’s method for continuous improvement?

Answer 26

Plan-Do-Check-Act

Deming’s model is Plan-Do-Check-Act. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, Page 275]

Question 27

You have been assigned an RPA project in your organization. Due to the complexity of the project, you think it will be beneficial if you develop a business analysis plan prior to conducting business analysis activities. The product team considers business analysis planning as unnecessary paperwork. Which of the following is a key benefit of business analysis planning that the team must understand?

Answer 27

It enables buy-in and support for the business analysis activities.

Business analysis planning achieves buy-in and support for the business analysis process before the work begins. Although a project’s success is dependent on adequate business analysis, having a business plan alone cannot guarantee the success of the project. The other two choices are absurd. [Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide, page 38; The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 127-129]

Question 28

You are leading a predictive project. All requirements elicitation and analysis activities have been completed and a requirements baseline has been established. What would you do if stakeholders propose new requirements after this stage?

Answer 28

Follow the approved change control process.

On projects that use a predictive life cycle, once the baseline has been established, changes can only be made by performing the change management procedures defined for the project. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 264]

Question 29

You have been assigned to lead the business analysis activities for a construction productivity monitoring and reporting system. If this project is successful, your organization will be first in the market to digitize such a manual and complex process. Most of the stakeholders are blue collar workers and are struggling to articulate system requirements. As you are struggling to understand how the labor productivity will be measured, the stakeholders are finding it difficult to envision how a digitized system will replace the current manual system. Which of the following technique will you use in this situation to elicit requirements?

Answer 29

Observation

Since the stakeholders are struggling to envision how the future system will work, conducting workshops and interviews will not provide the desired results. Further, since you are also struggling to understand how the current system works, you will not be able to develop a prototype. Your best bet, in this case, is to observe the current manual system and see how the current processes are performed. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 168]

Question 30

Your product team has recently released a new accounting system into the market which has not been well-received by your customers. You have invited a few SMEs for a workshop to identify the product features that customers find problematic. You are planning to use the speedboat technique during the workshop to identify these problems. On a speedboat diagram, where do you document the problems?

Answer 30

Anchors of the boat

Speedboat is an elicitation technique that uses game play to elicit information about product features that customers/stakeholders find problematic. All identified problems are documented on the anchors of the boat. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 166]

Question 31

For a project following a predictive life cycle, which of the following statements is most accurate?

Answer 31

Collect Requirements, Define Scope and Create WBS processes are performed toward the beginning of the project and updated as necessary, using the integrated change control process.

In a predictive project, the Collect Requirements, Define Scope and Create WBS processes are performed toward the beginning of the project and updated as necessary, using the integrated change control process. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, Page 131]

Question 32

Which of the following is a type of leadership style in which leaders are hands-off and allow group members to make the decisions:

Answer 32

Laissez-faire

Laissez-faire leadership, also known as delegated leadership, is a type of leadership style in which leaders are hands-off and allow group members to make the decisions. Researchers have found that this is generally the leadership style that leads to the lowest productivity among group members. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, Page 65]

Question 33

A product team has been developing an information system for two years. During this process, the stakeholders have lost their interest and confidence. Due to this reason, you are now struggling to schedule requirements elicitation sessions with the stakeholders. You believe that a high-fidelity prototype will help you regain stakeholder confidence. What should you do next?

Answer 33

Develop a working prototype using the programming language of the final solution.

High-fidelity prototypes are functional representations of the final finished solution to the user. High-fidelity prototyping is performed using a programming language or a pseudo language of the solution to be demonstrated. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 398]

Question 34

A product team is developing an information system for an organization using an adaptive life cycle. On such a project, how then will you create a requirements baseline?

Answer 34

Requirements are effectively baselined when they are identified as planned work.

On projects using an adaptive life cycle, requirements are effectively baselined when they are identified as planned work to be addressed in the next or subsequent iteration. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 264]

Question 35

You are conducting a product requirement review workshop and seeking approval of some key requirements. During the workshop, a conflict has emerged between the stakeholders with regards to the approval of a specific product requirement. Some stakeholders are in favor or the requirement and some are against. There is also a small number of stakeholders who are indifferent. You ask the stakeholders to vote for or against the requirement. You will consider the requirement approved if the biggest group of stakeholders is willing to approve it. What decision-making style have you adopted?

Answer 35

Plurality

This is example of plurality; you reach a decision by taking the most common answer received from among the decision makers. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 267]

Question 36

You are leading the business analysis activities on a procurement process improvement project with an objective of reducing the requisition-to-delivery time by at least fifty percent. The project scope includes revising the entire workflow and eliminating process wastes. Which of the following techniques would you use to understand how the existing work is performed?

Answer 36

Job analysis

The scenario is asking about a technique that will help you understand how the work is currently performed. The business analyst used the job analysis to understand how the existing job is currently performed. Seven wastes and Kaizen are process improvement techniques. Personal analysis is irrelevant. [Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide, page 44; The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 115-116]

Question 37

A product team has developed a sophisticated tool in isolation. This tool was shown to the executives who directed the product team to release the tool in the business. When the product team conducted the user acceptance testing sessions, most of the stakeholders did not appreciate the tool. Which of the following is a potential root cause of this situation?

Answer 37

Absence of acceptance criteria

Acceptance criteria are concrete and demonstrable conditions that must be met for the business stakeholders or customers to accept the item. Since the product team developed the product in isolation, stakeholder dissatisfaction at the time of UAT is not a surprise. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 292]

Question 38

The project sponsor has asked you to include the analysis of the existing organizational goals and objectives as part of your current state analysis. Which of the following statements regarding organizational strategy, goals and objectives is CORRECT?

Answer 38

Goals define the measurable targets that a business establishes in order to deliver on its strategy.

Organizational goals define the measurable targets that a business establishes in order to deliver on its strategy. Objectives are the statements aimed at directing the actions of the organization to reach its goals. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 65]

Question 39

The stakeholder engagement plan is developed early during the project planning phase. However, as the project moves into its execution phase, project stakeholders’ needs, interests and/or influence might change. If a significant change happens, what should the business analyst do?

Answer 39

Reconduct stakeholder analysis and update the stakeholder register.

As soon as you are made aware of such changes, you need to reconduct stakeholder analysis and update the stakeholder register with the changes. These changes must also be discussed with the project manager. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 115]

Question 40

You are introducing Agile project management practices to a product team and helping the team define the project scope in terms of user stories. Due to the complexity of the project and the uncertainty with the requirements, the product team is struggling to estimate the user stories in person-hours. You tell them, they should not worry about this and instead estimate the user stories in story points. The amount of effort required to deliver a user story is known as:

Answer 40

Story size

The amount of effort required to deliver a user story is known as story size. Teams consider story size so that they do not try to commit to more stories than there is team capacity. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 133]

Question 41

Your team is about to commence a new mobile application development project. The product backlog contains several unprioritized features. The team wanted a method to analyze these features from the potential customers’ viewpoints and prioritize these for development. You conduct a Kano analysis for all the identified features. What should you do next?

Answer 41

Prioritize the features in the “basic” category for development.

The Kano analysis explores a product’s features from the viewpoint of the customer. Basic features provide little satisfaction to the customers, but, when missing from the end solution, cause extreme dissatisfaction. On the other hand, the absence of delighters and indifferent features do not cause dissatisfaction. Features in the reverse category should not be developed at all. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 80]

Question 42

You are a lead business analyst in a team that is developing a new technological system. The team has just completed the first sprint of the project and preparing to start the second. You think that it is the right time for the team to reflect and review current stakeholder engagement and communication approach. What should you do next?

Answer 42

Call a retrospective meeting.

Retrospectives and lessons learned use past experience to plan for future work. An optimal stakeholder engagement and communication approach may consider recommendations provided from past projects or prior iterations. You need to call a retrospective meeting so that the team can review the current stakeholder engagement and communication approach. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 126]

Question 43

You are currently attending a seminar on project management. One of the speakers has just talked about rolling wave planning and how this is similar to Agile approaches to project management. Although you can see some similarities, you also understand the differences. Rolling Wave planning is a form of?

Answer 43

Progressive Elaboration

Rolling wave is a form of progressive elaboration planning, where the near-term work is planned in detail and the work for the far future is planned at a much higher level. As the project progresses, the subsequent milestones are planned in greater and greater detail. [PMBOK® Guide 6th Edition, Page 185]

Question 44

Which of the following is a series of conditions that the entire team agrees to complete before an item is considered sufficiently developed to be accepted by the business stakeholders?

Answer 44

Definition of Done

Definition of Done (DoD) is a series of conditions that the entire team agrees to complete before an item is considered sufficiently developed to be accepted by the business stakeholders. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 394]

Question 45

You are writing an auto report generation use case. In case the inventory levels fall below a certain point, the system is required to automatically generate a report containing the current stock levels to the warehouse supervisor. If the warehouse supervisor does not read the report in the next twenty-four hours, a copy of the report is sent to the procurement manager. Details regarding the report’s auto-generation event needs to be documented as the:

Answer 45

Trigger

The trigger of a use case describes the event that causes the use case to start. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 214]

Question 46

You are helping a PMO optimize its operational processes. You are currently focusing on project configuration control processes. You find out that the current processes have an incorrect approach to configuration control. On any project, the configuration control should be focused on the specification of:

Answer 46

Deliverables and processes

The focus of configuration control is on specification of both the deliverables and the processes. The rest of the choices are incorrect. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, Page 118]

Question 47

Which of the following models should you develop if you want to analyze all states of an object and all transition combinations so that allowed transition states can be differentiated from unallowed transition states?

Answer 47

State Table

The state table and state diagram are data models that show the valid states of an object and any allowed transitions between those states. State tables model all states as both a column and a row in a table that allows a business analyst to systematically consider each potential state transition (from row to column) to determine if the transition should be allowed or is not capable of being transitioned to/from other states. State diagrams, on the other hand, visually depict the states and transitions, but only show valid transitions for the object. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 203]

Question 48

You are leading the business analysis activities on a software development project. Which of the following stakeholder analysis techniques would help you analyze stakeholder requirements to determine how a user class would interact with the system and how would that user class use the product?

Answer 48

Persona analysis

Persona analysis is a technique that is conducted to analyze a class of users for understanding their needs and behaviors. During stakeholder analysis, this technique is used to analyze how a user class interacts with a system or how a user class would use a product. The results of persona analysis can then be used in context diagrams, user stories and epics. [Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide, page 45; The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 115-116]

Question 49

You are leading a manufacturing process improvement project. You have mapped out the as-is process and are ready to analyze the process to identify any time spent in the process that does not add value to the business. Which of the following tools can be used to achieve this objective?

Answer 49

Value stream map

Value stream maps are a variation of process flows. In addition to information in a traditional process flow, a value stream map shows delays, queues, or handoffs that occur during the process. The purpose of a value stream map is to identify any time spent in the process that does not add value so it can be streamlined. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 198]

Question 50

Which of the following team events can be used to prioritize requirements and select the requirements for development?

Answer 50

Iteration planning

In adaptive approaches, iteration planning or sprint planning is the activity used to identify the subset of product backlog items that the product development team will work on for the current iteration or sprint. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 233]