PMI-PBA Mock Exam Lite - 3

Question 1

You are auditing a product team that is developing a new accounting system. You want to map out all the use cases against all developed UI wireframes. Which of the following tools can you use to quickly map out these relationships and identify any gaps?

Answer 1

Interaction matrix

An interaction matrix is a lightweight version of a traceability matrix that is used to figure out whether requirements are sufficiently detailed or if any entities are missing. In an interaction matrix, the rows are one type of product information, typically in the form of use cases, user stories, or process flows. The columns of the matrix are the names of a different type of product information, such as data entity, business rule, or user interface. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 196]

Question 2

You are about to conclude a day-long requirement elicitation workshop. In order to confirm your elicitation results, you want all the workshop participants to peer review your consolidated notes while you help them through this item by item. This technique is known as:

Answer 2

Walkthrough

A walkthrough is a peer review in which the author of the materials walks the peer reviewers through the authored information. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 172]

Question 3

You are reviewing a product team’s performance on a software development project. The business analysis activities are underway, and the business analyst is currently working on their analysis approach. Which of the following is a key consideration when planning for analysis?

Answer 3

Which analysis techniques will be best suited to meet stakeholder and project needs?

During planning for analysis, the business analyst will begin to think about which analysis techniques will be best suited to meet stakeholder and project needs. The other choices are the business needs analysis and planning for elicitation considerations. [Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide, page 54; The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 177]

Question 4

You are the lead business analyst on a complex ERP implementation project. Due to the complexity of the project, you believe that it will be useful if you document your business analysis approach for managing and performing the business analysis activities on the project. Where should you document your business analysis approach?

Answer 4

Business analysis plan

The business analysis approach is simply the method a business analyst uses when managing and performing the business analysis activities on a project. The business analysis approach is documented in the business analysis plan. [Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide, page 37; The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 127-129]

Question 5

You are leading the business analysis activities for the digitization of a complex cross-functional organizational resource planning workflow. You have a big list of stakeholders on this project. While some of the stakeholders have simple and linear roles in this workflow, many stakeholders have complex and multiple roles and touchpoints. Which of the following is the recommended good approach to analyze these stakeholders in order to facilitate the requirements elicitation process on this project?

Answer 5

Create personas and assign one or more personas to each stakeholder.

Grouping the stakeholders based on their power, interest and influence is important for managing stakeholders and their expectations. However, such groupings do not offer any advantages to the requirements elicitation process. A persona is a fictional character created to represent an individual or group of stakeholders, termed a user class. For an individual class, a persona can include any number of descriptive features the team decides are worth capturing; for example, goals, behaviors, motivations, demographics, and high-level requirements, etc. Creating personas will help you understand stakeholder requirements better and remove the complexity of overlapping requirements. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 117]

Question 6

You are leading a complex system automation project. The project has a huge number of stakeholders with varying interest and support level. You want to group these stakeholders into manageable categories. Which of the following is a technique that can be used to group stakeholders by fictional categories so that their needs, requirements, and behaviors can be analyzed as a group?

Answer 6

Persona analysis

Persona analysis is a technique that can be used to analyze a class of users or process workers, to understand their needs or product design and behavior requirements. Note that the outcome of this analysis can be documented in the stakeholder register by assigning each stakeholder to their relevant class. Stakeholder register is a project artifact and not a technique. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 118]

Question 7

Return on investment (ROI) is commonly used to measure the financial benefits of an investment. Economists and financial analysts, especially for long-term investments, generally do not prefer this method because:

Answer 7

The formula doesn’t factor in the time value of money.

Economists and financial analysts generally use alternative approaches to measure financial benefits such as IRR and NPV since the ROI measure doesn’t factor in the time value of money. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 90]

Question 8

You are Leading the business analysis activities for a major organizational transformation project. You have recently completed the first draft of your business analysis plan and it has been reviewed by the key stakeholders who have not raised any concerns with the plan. What should you do next?

Answer 8

Obtain approval for the business analysis plan.

When the business analysis plan has been reviewed by the key stakeholders and all concerns have been resolved, the business analyst should take the next steps to obtain approval on the plan. [Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide, page 68; The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 127]

Question 9

You are analyzing a complex process flow and completed all elicitation activities. In order to further analyze the process flow you have decided to develop multiple process models to slice and dice this information further. Which of the following is NOT a process model?

Answer 9

Display-action-response model

The display-action-response model is an interface model and not a process model. The rest of the choices are all process models. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 185]

Question 10

You are serving a product team as their lead business analyst. The product team has recently released the first prototype of the solution. Although the prototype has been warmly received by the stakeholders, some stakeholders have requested additional access to some of the developed system reports. Before you authorize the product team to allow the read access for these reports to these stakeholders, which of the following documents you should update?

Answer 10

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 entity relationship diagram does not need to change as no new data element has been introduced. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 197]

Question 11

You are leading the business analysis activities for a process automation project. You have recently completed all elicitation activities and now want to summarize the results in a process model. Which of the following is a process model that you can use?

Answer 11

Use Case

A Use Case is a process model. The rest of the choices are not process models. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 185]

Question 12

You are a consultant helping an organization develop its project management framework. You are currently developing a number of project management templates and checklists. Which of the following is typically documented prior to initiating a project?

Answer 12

Business requirement

A business requirement describes the higher-level needs of an organization such as business issues or opportunities and reasons why an initiative has been undertaken. These are typically analyzed and documented prior to the project initiation. The rest of the project artifacts are developed during the project lifecycle. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 10]

Question 13

You are conducting a feasibility analysis of multiple available options to deliver a certain capability to the organization. Each of the available options involves an upfront initial investment followed by periodic maintenance costs. Further each option promises a different revenue stream for the business. Which of the following analytical techniques evaluates investment potential considering time-value of money?

Answer 13

Discounted cash flow

Discounted cash flow analysis uses future free cash flow projections and discounts them to arrive at a present value estimate, which is used to evaluate the potential for investment. The rest of the choices are incorrect because Pareto analysis is carried out to identify the most significant factors out of many; earned value management is carried out to monitor and control cost of an ongoing project; while the Monte Carlo is a simulation technique used to analyze project risks. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, Page 473]

Question 14

You are responsible for the merger of two major telecom operators in the country. You have collected and documented operating processes from both organizations and now want a pool of SMEs help you select the better ones. You want to apply a technique that would enhance brainstorming with a voting process used to rank the most useful ideas so they can be taken up for further brainstorming. Which technique should you apply?

Answer 14

Nominal group technique

The nominal group technique enhances brainstorming with a voting process. This then allows the most useful ideas to be prioritized and taken up for further brainstorming. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, Page 144]

Question 15

Communication noise refers to influences on effective communication that influence the interpretation of conversations. Noise affects which components of communication?

Answer 15

Transmission and decoding

Noise is anything that compromises the original meaning of a message. It gets either introduced during the transmission itself or during decoding (when the receiver of the message doesn’t fully comprehend). [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, Page 371]

Question 16

You are automating a warehouse stock replenishment and reordering system. The reorder quantity and the selection of the supplier depend upon several variables. You have collected all the rules that define this logic. This hierarchical decision logic now must be validated by the stakeholders. Which of the following models should you develop next to document this logic considering the ease of the stakeholders to review and understand?

Answer 16

Decision Tree

A decision table and decision tree are rule models that show a series of decisions and the outcomes to which the decisions lead. Decision trees and tables are often used to model business rules. Both models can be used here, however, decision trees are usually easier for stakeholders to review than decision tables. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 189]

Question 17

You are managing an organizational re-design project. Although the higher-level operating model was approved by the CEO, the senior executives are struggling to envision the future state. This has brought a significant degree of uncertainty to your project success. Which of the following is a major project risk at this stage?

Answer 17

Scope creep

Since the project has significant uncertainties, this can contribute to high rate of change and project complexity. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, page 397]

Question 18

Mary is managing an organizational transformation project. The nature of the project would require responding to high levels of change and would also require continuous stakeholder engagement. Which of the project lifecycles should be chosen for this project?

Answer 18

Adaptive life cycle

Projects with adaptive life cycles are intended to respond to high levels of change and require ongoing stakeholder engagement. All other choices are predictive life cycles which are designed to be plan driven rather than being change driven. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, Page 131]

Question 19

You have been assigned to lead the business analysis activities on a project. You have recently developed your business analysis plan and started the business analysis activities. You get notified that a project manager has now been assigned on your project. What should the new project manager do with your business analysis plan?

Answer 19

Integrate it with the overall project management plan.

The business analysis plan developed by the business analyst should be integrated into the overall project management plan managed by the project manager. [Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide, page 38; The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 127-129]

Question 20

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. You ask the stakeholders to vote for or against the requirement. You will consider the requirement approved if 50% or more stakeholders are willing to approve it. What decision-making style have you adopted?

Answer 20

Majority

This is example of majority; you reach a decision when support is obtained from more than 50% of the members of the group. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 267]

Question 21

The objective of a transformation project is to move an organization from one state to another state. Before the project begins, the organization is commonly referred to as being in the:

Answer 21

Current State

Before the project begins, the organization is commonly referred to as being in the current state. The desired result of the change derived by the project is described as the future state. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, Page 6]

Question 22

You are the functional business analyst on a software development project. You have worked with the stakeholders to define the current-state and the future-state process flows. A technical business analyst on the team has developed a feature model for the product. You are not sure about the alignment of the feature model developed by the technical business analyst and the future-state process model approved by the stakeholders. Which of the following tools can help you analyze the degree of alignment between these two?

Answer 22

Traceability matrix

A traceability matrix is a table that connects or traces links between items. Most commonly, business analysts use traceability matrices to trace requirements backward to features and business objectives. A business analyst can repurpose the traceability matrix to analyze models to ensure that they are complete. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 195]

Question 23

You are leading a requirement review and approval workshop with some senior project stakeholders. During the workshop, a conflict developed between the stakeholders over some requirements and you decide to use Delphi technique to find common ground. What should be your first step in using this technique?

Answer 23

Create a questionnaire

Delphi is a consensus-building technique. Stakeholders participate in this technique anonymously. For this exercise, you first need a questionnaire to elicit ideas about the important points related to the conflict and then use rounds of anonymous voting till common ground is found. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 265]

Question 24

You have been assigned a project to deliver a new ERP system for an organization. The organizational PMO is overseeing this project and has asked you to submit the project’s WBS for a review. The PMO rejected the WBS stating that it doesn’t correctly apply the 100 percent rule. Which of the following statements correctly define the 100 percent rule for WBS?

Answer 24

The total of the work at the work package level should roll up to the higher levels so that nothing is left out and no extra work is performed.

The WBS represents all product and project work, including the project management work. The total of the work at the lowest levels should roll up to the higher levels so that nothing is left out and no extra work is performed. This is called the 100 percent rule. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, Page 161]

Question 25

The senior business analyst has successfully demonstrated to you (the project sponsor) that your current system upgrade project has arrived at a point of diminishing returns. At this stage, the project has hardly delivered 70% of the solution requirements. What should you do next?

Answer 25

Terminate the project.

A point of diminishing returns is the point where additional value that could be obtained from a solution does not justify the additional effort needed to achieve that value. In this case, Solution Evaluation gives teams the ability to “end early” even if there is still additional functionality that could be built, allowing funds to be reallocated to work on higher-priority projects. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 279]

Question 26

Which of the following Agile tools is used to visualize the progress of work items through a project?

Answer 26

Kanban

A Kanban board provides a means to visualize the flow of work, make impediments easily visible, and allow flow to be managed by adjusting the work in process limits. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 233]

Question 27

Your organization was the only telecom operator in your country until recently when two new international telecom operators were licensed to launch their networks. The new operators are now offering better service at a cheaper price. What do you need to do to identify your competitors’ strengths and uncover areas of weakness in your organization?

Answer 27

Conduct a competitive analysis focused on your competition’s processes.

Competitive analysis is a technique for obtaining and analyzing information about an organization’s external environment. Results from competitive analysis may identify competitor strengths that impose threats or may uncover an area of weakness an organization has in comparison to its competition. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 60]

Question 28

Your business analyst has completed a series of product requirements gathering workshops and has developed a detailed product specification. You now have to analyze this and other project requirements to define the project’s scope. In regards to WBS, which of the following is the correct way to decompose the project scope?

Answer 28

Total scope -> control account -> planning package -> work package

A planning package is a work breakdown structure component below the control account and above the work package with known work content but without detailed schedule activities. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, Page 161]

Question 29

During the Collect Requirements process, a group of people were discussing multiple alternatives. One of the individuals in the group made the decision for the group. This method of reaching a group decision is termed:

Answer 29

Autocratic

The method where a single individual makes the decision on behalf of a group is termed autocratic. Other group decision-making techniques are unanimity (everyone agrees on a course of action), majority (support from more than 50% of members), and plurality (the largest block decides even if a majority is not achieved). [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, Page 144]

Question 30

You have recently conducted a requirements elicitation workshop and captured several functional and non-functional product requirements. Stakeholders from the IT department provided some high-level technical system integration requirements regarding the product integration with the organizational financial system. However, these stakeholders were not quite sure about the accuracy of these requirements. Which of the following could help you confirm these requirements?

Answer 30

By reviewing the financial system’s technical documentation.

If the stakeholders are not sure about the accuracy of some requirements, these need to be confirmed by some other source. Reviewing the technical documentation and verifying the integration requirements is one way to confirm these requirements. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 172]

Question 31

You are a business analyst on a waterfall project which is currently in the Solution Evaluation stage. What is your authoritative source for the project’s expected benefits when determining whether the implemented solution has delivered its intended business value?

Answer 31

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 32

You are leading the business analysis effort on a process automation project. The project is being championed by the CEO who is actively following the progress. You conducted a stakeholder identification workshop with some subject matter experts and have come up with a big list of stakeholders. What should you do next?

Answer 32

Group the stakeholders by common characteristics.

When a large number of stakeholders has been identified, the next logical step in stakeholder analysis is to group the stakeholders by common characteristics which helps to streamline further analysis. [Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide, page 39; The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 111]

Question 33

A planning technique used to provide products, services, and results that truly reflect customer requirements, by translating those customer requirements into the appropriate technical requirements for each phase of project product development, is:

Answer 33

Voice of the Customer

The correct response is Voice of the Customer. This is one of the non-proprietary approaches to quality management. In this planning technique, the customer’s requirements are exactly met in the finished product during each phase of the project. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, Pages 145, 726]

Question 34

A project team is currently planning a website development project. All customer requirements have been gathered, documented and validated by the customer. The team is now ready to put together the project’s work breakdown structure. Which of the following is an output of the Create WBS process?

Answer 34

Scope baseline

The scope baseline is an output of the Create WBS process. The other choices are either inputs or tools and techniques of the process. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, Page 156]

Question 35

You are leading the business analysis effort on a process automation project. The project is being championed by the CEO who is actively following the progress. You conducted a stakeholder identification workshop with some subject matter experts and have come up with a big list of stakeholders. You want to group the stakeholders by common characteristics. Which of the following processes should you perform?

Answer 35

Conduct Stakeholder Analysis

When many stakeholders have been identified, the next logical step in stakeholder analysis is to group the stakeholders by common characteristics which helps to streamline further analysis. The most relevant PMI Guide to Business Analysis process is Conduct Stakeholder Analysis. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 115]

Question 36

You are leading a massive knowledge work project. Some team members have complained they have to work overtime in order to complete some of the assigned work. What should you do to resolve this issue?

Answer 36

Establish a Kanban board and set WIP limits

The problem at hand is unmanageable WIP. The solution is to limit the WIP based on team capacity. A Kanban board can be really helpful in setting this up. A Kanban board provides a means to visualize the flow of work, make impediments easily visible, and allow flow to be managed by adjusting the work in process limits. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 233]

Question 37

You are reviewing your product backlog and found some conflicting requirements. As the lead business analyst on this project, how would you address this issue?

Answer 37

Obtain a consensus through negotiation.

The business analyst does not decide which features are built and which are not. The authority lies with the stakeholders, and in adaptive projects, with the product owner to approve or reject requirements. As the business analyst, you are responsible for resolving this conflict by negotiation with the people in the authority to approve these requirements. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 264]

Question 38

You have recently joined a product team as the business analyst. The previous business analyst completed all product requirement elicitation activities. However, you were not able to identify which project requirements have been approved. You are now reviewing the meeting minutes of all stakeholder engagements during the requirement elicitation stage. Which of the following requirements are safe to be considered as approved?

Answer 38

All requirements that are verified and validated.

An approved requirement is a requirement that is verified and validated and has been deemed an accurate reflection of what the product development team should build. You need to review the minutes to identify such requirements. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 388]

Question 39

You have recently completed product elicitation activities and gathered a huge list of product requirements. You want to prioritize these requirements based on their value to stakeholders. You call a workshop to play a collaborative game with the stakeholders to prioritize these requirements. You give each stakeholder an amount of pretend money to buy their choice of features, splitting the money received across features however desired. Which prioritization technique is this?

Answer 39

Buy a feature

Buy a feature is a type of collaborative game used to enable a group of stakeholders to agree on prioritization by giving each stakeholder an amount of pretend money to buy their choice of features, splitting the money received across features however desired. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 391]

Question 40

You are leading a software development project using an adaptive lifecycle. The project sponsor wanted to see a detailed work breakdown structure, but you cannot show this to the sponsor. Instead you are thinking to present a product roadmap. Which of the following business analysis processes could help you prepare a product roadmap?

Answer 40

Facilitate Product Roadmap Development

The Facilitate Product Roadmap Development is the process of supporting the development of a product roadmap. None of the other choices is a valid PMI Guide to Business Analysis process. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 92]

Question 41

You have been asked to analyze the current sales and marketing capabilities of your organization and design and implement a sales pipeline management process. To proceed, you need an initial list of key stakeholders to start your conversations. Which of the following processes should you perform next to quickly generate an initial list of stakeholders?

Answer 41

Identify Stakeholders

Identify Stakeholders is the process of identifying the individuals, groups, or organizations that may impact, are impacted by, or are perceived to be impacted by the area under assessment. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 111]

Question 42

You are leading the business analysis activities for a process automation project. You have recently completed all elicitation activities and now want to summarize the results in a process model. You decide to develop use cases to document these outcomes. What is the primary focus of use cases?

Answer 42

Describe the system-user interactions to achieve successful completion of a goal.

A Use Case is a process model that uses textual narrative to describe the system-user interactions to achieve successful completion of a goal. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 214]

Question 43

You have recently completed all requirements elicitation workshops for your product and documented all user requirements as epics. When you presented these epics to the product team, they were concerned about the sizes of the epics as most of the epics required more than one iteration for development. In this case, what should be done next?

Answer 43

Slice the stories in collaboration with the product team.

Story slicing is a technique to split epics or user stories from a higher level to a lower level. The reason to split stories is that sometimes stories are too big to construct in an iteration. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 214]

Question 44

A product team has recently completed all product requirements elicitation activities. This information needs to be transformed into models for an upcoming stakeholder update meeting. The team has already developed a scope and data model for the product. Now the team wants to develop a rule model to complement the already developed models. Which of the following is a rule model?

Answer 44

Decision table

A decision table is a rule model. None of the rest of the choices are example of a rule model. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 185]

Question 45

You are leading the business analysis activities for the development of a new inventory management software product. You have developed the ER model and now want to develop a model that lists the data fields and attributes of those fields for each data object in the ER model. Which of the following models should you develop?

Answer 45

Data Dictionary

A data dictionary is a data model that lists the data fields and attributes of those fields for a data object. The data fields are additional details for the data objects in an entity relationship diagram. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 187]

Question 46

You have recently completed your product requirements elicitation activities and formally documented the results. You now want to schedule a workshop so that stakeholders can validate these requirements. Which of the following techniques can be used during this workshop to confirm the requirements?

Answer 46

Walkthrough

Fishbone diagram is a root cause analysis technique and not a requirements confirmation technique. Brainstorming and affinity diagrams are idea generation techniques and are not applicable for confirming requirements. A walkthrough is a peer review in which the author of the materials walks the peers or stakeholders through the authored information. A walkthrough may be conducted to review the results of elicitation to obtain confirmation that the results are accurate. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 172]

Question 47

Financial forecasts in the business case were of a higher order of magnitude based on the preliminary information available at that time. During the project planning it has now become clear that a number of other enabling activities need to be completed in order to deliver the project. This would mean at least a fifty percent increase in the project budget than what was stated in the business case. What should you do next?

Answer 47

Perform a cost/benefit analysis for the project.

If a 50% cost increase is expected, you need to re-evaluate the project’s feasibility and reconfirm the validity of the business case, even if the project is in the planning stage. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, page 30]

Question 48

You want to develop a feature model for your product. Which of the following techniques should you use with the stakeholders and SMEs to identify the product features and group them together into categories?

Answer 48

Brainstorming

The feature mode can be used in combination with brainstorming technique to help stakeholders identify features by focusing on the groupings, similar to an affinity diagram. The other techniques are not idea generation techniques. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 193]

Question 49

If you are creating a new WBS for your project, what should you do to save time during the creation process?

Answer 49

Use a previous WBS from a similar project as a template.

Creating the WBS is a very important process, but often a previous WBS can be used as a template to save time and avoid the risk of forgetting something important. [PMBOK® Guide 6th edition, Page 157]

Question 50

You are initiating a complex software development project. Due to the project’s complexity, the product team has decided to deploy adaptive product development methods. You want to setup a mechanism that will help you in creating and managing product and iteration backlogs. You also want this mechanism to automatically produce daily burndown charts. What mechanism you should establish?

Answer 50

Requirements management tool

Requirements management tools allow requirements and other product information to be captured and stored in a repository. These tools help maintain audit trails and perform version control to assist with change management. These tools also facilitate review and approval processes thorough workflow functionality. Requirements management tools catered to adaptive projects may include additional functionality to create and manage product and iteration backlogs, and produce burndown charts. [The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, page 260]