BA diploma Revision

Question 1

Explain the purpose of an organisation’s vision

Answer 1

A vision is a statement that defines the ideal state of an organisation. Provide clarity for the organisation existing.

Question 2

Apply a suitable technique to analyse the internal environment

Answer 2

VMOST and Resource Audit
Vision, Mission, Objectives. Strategy, Tactics.
Resource Audit
(Tangible and Non tangible parts of the company)
Physical - Buildings, Equipment, Trains
Human - Staff skill set, Loyalty, How long they been in the company
Financial - What are the finances of the company
- this can all feed into out internal side of SWOT analysis

Question 3

Apply a suitable technique to analyse the external environment

Answer 3

PESTLE -
Political - Force in politics that can change the way you handle business
Economics - Force in budget environment that can change the way you handle business
Social Culture - Trends within social culture
Technology - Trends with in Tech
Legal - Trend and expectations towards legal legistration (Discrimination act, GRPD)
Environment - Changes in your environment such as ecological (Climate change, Echo emissions, pollution, society)

Porters 5 forces
Power for supplier - How much do your rely on the supply to run your business, and how much is there of it
Power of Buyer - Does the buyer have other options they can go to
Threat of new entrants - New systems and better systems may be coming
Threat of substitute products - New cheaper items coming.
Competitors

Question 4

Prepare a SWOT analyses

Answer 4

Two parts
Strengths and weaknesses - Internal
Opportunity and threats - External

Must align to your vision of the VMOST
Internal can be found from your resource audit
External can be found from PESTLE and 5 forces

Question 5

Tools to measure performance

Answer 5

CSF - Critical Success Factor
KPIs - Key point Indicators
Performance Targets

CSF - Company needs sales staff trained in Ezone course customer safety.

KPI - How many employees have signed up and completed training

PT - Must have 7 staff employees to signed up and completed training in the sales department for Ezone course ‘Customer Safety’

Business Balance scorecard
4 perspectives - Financial, Customers perspective, Learning and growth, Business Processes

Must have a goal and target

Learning and Growth - goal: To have a strong team that have intelligence of gourmet fish food. - Target - Make sure we hire 3 people with degree in the subject

Customer Perspective: Goal: To be seen as the number mortgage choice provider. Target: Make store look presentable for shop window

Business Processes: Be able to sell top quality houses. Inactive. Make sure we are talking to clients with houses marked up at over £1 million pounds, Initiatives: Speak to clients

Financial - Increase revenue, Increase percentage of houses on the market

Question 6

Identify generic stakeholders via the stakeholder wheel

Answer 6

Parters - Example: an outsourcing company that provide catering services
Suppliers: A supplier needs to be notified of changes and understand the benefits the change will bring themselves.
Regulators: Need stakeholders there to make sure the change is not impacting against any legistrations rules and regulations.
Managers.
Subject matter experts
Customers
Competitors - how they might react will they block the change?

Question 7

Explain the activities required to engage with stakeholders

Answer 7

Identify stakeholders
Challenge an inform stakeholders
Negioate stakeholder conflict
Written and verbal communication
Support and facilitate stakeholders through meetings.

Question 8

CATWOE to analyse stakeholders perspective

Answer 8

Use CATWOE to analyse how the business should be run by a stakeholder perspective
For a bookstore
Customer - Local residents, people with a thirst for horror and fiction novels and subscribed to our membership programme
Actor - Salesman, and safe
Transformation - Sells books that are mainly only horror and fiction
Worldview - Providing a service to our people who want to lose their heads in a good fiction book for a few hours, the books are second-hand which reduces our carbon footprint and profit margins
Owner - The bookshop keeper
Environment - Comes from PESTLE (Funded by local community) reduces carbon footprint by recycling old books

Question 9

Categorise stakeholders in terms of their power and interest.

Answer 9

Power Interest grid
INTEREST AND POWER
Constant management
Keep satisfied
watch
Keep onside
ignore
keep informed

Question 10

Choose suitable methods to research the business situation

Answer 10

Websites of the organisation
What its values are, what its missions and visions are.
Incites to the level of professionalism for their website
Company reports
Information on the current processes and procedures, Explains the target market and perspectives of stakeholders
Organization charts
How the company is structured, who sits where in terms of hierarchy

Question 11

Identify - Quantitative and qualitive investigation techniques

Answer 11

Qualitive:
Workshop - Good for big groups, getting a consensus - Time wasting hard to get everyone’s time
Interview - Good rapport but bias
Observation - good for tacit knowledge but might act differently
Scenario Analysis - Good for risk management - can get really confusing

Quantitative
Customer Surveys / Questionnaires - great for getting a lot of data but can be very high level
Document analysis - Good for explicit knowledge but can be tedious

Question 12

Tools to represent current business situations

Answer 12

Customer journey mapping - touchpoints, personas,
empathy mapping
mind maps
rich picture

Question 13

Use a BAM Business Activity Model

Answer 13

A BAM is derived from relative stakeholders. From the Transformation of the CATWOE such as ‘Rents Video’ You then have 3 activities Plan Enable do - Monitor and then control

Decide on books to sell
Enable - Buy books, decide prices
Do - Stock books, sell books
Monitor - Monitor buying patterns - Control this

Question 14

Explain the three types of business events

Answer 14

Internal, external, time bound

Question 15

Stakeholder attitudes

Answer 15

Champion
An active advocate for the project, who is willing to use their political capital to remove obstacles
Supporter
Supports the project
Neutral
Has no views for or against the project
Critic
Does not oppose the project actively
Opponent
Aims to disrupt the project
Blocker
Tries to sabotage the project, mainly for personal reasons

Question 16

Explain the use of The TOM

Answer 16

The target operating model is used to describe how the business needs to be established.
We needs POPIT to use an holistic approach
P - People, what sort of people do we need for the target state. What level of motivation is required, what is their skill set.
Organisation - Who will the key partners or suppliers, How many people are needed in what roles, how will this align to our culture
Processes - Which process will be used to in the target state. What efficiency gains will be obtained
Ifomrati9onal - What change will be made to capture store and analyse data, how strong will it be.
Technology - What tech will be used in the currents state? - How will this align to our processes.

Question 17

Identity and design the solution - Design thinking

Answer 17

Empathise
Define,
Ideate,
Prototype.
Evaluate ,
Create

Question 18

Explain divergent and convergent thinking

Answer 18

Divergent is we use as many ideas as we can come up with by exploring many solutions
Convergent is where we come up with one established idea.

Question 19

Explain the process of gap analysis

Answer 19

We compare the current state to the future state,
If the problem is localised we tend to use prototype, use cases.
If the problem impacts the processes, or an entire business we will use Fishbone diagram, rich pictures as is diagrams to understand the current state
The desired can be from a BAM or a TOM or To-be process maps

Potential issues include - Staff don’t have the skill set, we don’t have enough staff, The process will not support the current tech we have,

Question 20

What areas are in a feasibility study and explain them

Answer 20

Business, Technical and financial

Business - Does it match our objectives, Must be delivered in a time frame, Does the application work will with our current application architecture, does it meet our companies values, must align with other processes. including those that are not changing. Does it comply with relevant laws

Technical - Is the hardware reliable, what’s the performance like, is it maintainable, security to protect users and their data. Do we need to provide training, is it proven, is it home-grown or commercial of the the self, will we need internal help to configure it

Financial - Can we afford this? The need for borrowing via buying for this ourselves benefits. and the calculation for investment on return

Question 21

Appraisal techniques (Financial)

Answer 21

Payback, discounted cash flow and net present value

Payback calculation is a simple of way and seeing when your project will break even over a time - It doesn’t however show the value of todays money, also ignores cash flow once we broke even.

Discounted cash flow is a rate that can be found out by contacting the management accountant, Discounted cash flow reflects the time value of money.

The net present value is what reflects the calculation of when you time the discounted cash flow against the cash flow for the year, which gives you a more accurate description of what your money is worth today

Internal rate of return is where our discount rate needs to make our NPV = 0 - This way it makes it easier to compare with other projects, which option we should use.

Question 22

explain the rationale for a business case

Answer 22

Identify the need, identify the costs, provide information for decision makers

Question 23

Four management levels of a business case

Answer 23

Key decision makers - that give the go or no decision on investment
Senior business management -Who will be involved in fulfilling the cooperate strategy and wants to be involved
Project management and team - who will be responsible for the tasks and deliverables
Project records - to see how well the business case turned out in terms to reality

Question 24

What is in a business case?

Answer 24

BOSCARD - Background, Objectives, Scope, constants, Assumptions, roles and responsibilities and deliverables.

Introduction - sets up the scene and why we are doing the business case
Management summary - Should detail what the whole project is about, options we considered, the statement of recommendation, what studies we did to find out about the issues we were having.
Disruption of current state
Options considered
Option description - Cost and benefits - either tangible or non tangible
Impact assessment -
Risk assessment
Recommendations - time scales
Appendices - supporting documents

Question 25

Identify risks - what are the three main events

Answer 25

Business, technical and project risks

Question 26

How to find out about risks

Answer 26

Brainstorming, questionnaires

Question 27

What is in a risk assessment

Answer 27

The description, probability, impact, owner and countermeasures

Question 28

What are the countermeasures (management)

Answer 28

Mitigate( make something less severe), transfer(Give it to a third party), accept (Accept and choose weather resolves, avoid or transfer) or avoid

Question 29

Can risks be positive

Answer 29

Yes, over 100 people sign up to our website and it crashes

Question 30

Levels of impact it can have on the business

Answer 30

Organisational structure =

Question 31

explain Business case and business change lifecycle how do they relate

Answer 31

Alignment, define, design, implementation, realisation Does the change align to our culture our values, are we in alignment with PESTLE Definition - Cost, benefit analysis and time scales - What is our problem and how we going to tackle this Design - requirements, tested the solution, development Implementation - Checks against original estimates, is the project still viable Realisation - what was our lesson learnt, review the predicted benefits, which are being achieved and what needs further action

Question 32

Analyse the cost and benefits

Answer 32

Tangible and non Tangible Immediate and Longer term Tangible cost - Staff costs, equipment, Packaged software, Tangible benefit - Staff savings, Faster responses, Reduced effort and faster responses to customers Intangible cost - Recruitment, disruption and loss to productivity, brand damage, loss of employee moral Intangible benefit - improved moral, Better communications, Improved customer satisfaction.

Question 33

Describe the term requirements

Answer 33

A feature that the business users need the new system to provide They reflect the overall needs of the business and needs to be implemented via the solution, it supports the business and addresses the issues that we are experiencing

Question 34

Disadvantage to requirements

Answer 34

To little definition and not enough definition. Ambiguity - sometimes requirements are quite vague Can be bias and from one view point Lack of traceability

Question 35

Describe the requirement framework

Answer 35

Requirement Elicitation Requirement Analysis - Make sure they are clear and understandable and SMART - Prioritise MoSCoW Requirement Validation - Make sure they have been validated by a Sponsor Requirement documentation - Make sure they are well documented - BRD - what we need Functional requirement - how we are going to do it Requirement Management - Covering change management, version control - Document the change, analyse the change consider time cost and benefits, Change in scope, competition, legist ration

Question 36

What's in a terms of reference

Answer 36

Typically before the project gets underway, The scope, the objectives, deliverables, constraints - LIMIT on time and budget Uses framework OSCAR Objectives, scope, constraints, authority, resources

Question 37

What is PID

Answer 37

Its a project management tool, that is always open (meaning it can be updated) - It involves the commutation plan, the risk management plan, the communication plan, roles and responsivities, the project def and project approach

Question 38

Explain the difference between tacit and Explicit - What techniques would you use

Answer 38

Tacit is knowledge is hard to find, it usually is found during observation technique - shadowing, observation, prototyping, Its more to find our how users interact with a functionality and how we can make it easier and streamline services for the user. Explicit knowledge - is easier to find document analysis - Its like laws and legistrations, things that wont change

Question 39

Name elicitation techniques for quantitative and qualitative

Answer 39

Qualitative - Workshops - Interviews - Observations, Scenario analysis Quotative - Document analysis, Survey / Questionnaires

Question 40

What techniques do you need as a BA

Answer 40

Personal qualities, Professional techniques and business knowledge Personal qualities - Leadership, influential, negotiator, politically aware, team working, problem solving Professional Technique - Investigation techniques, business modelling and gap analysis Business Knowledge - Commercial aware, good domain knowledge, subject matter expertise

Question 41

Hierarchy of requirements what are the type of requirements

Answer 41

Objectives link to requirements Business and solution requirements Business requirements - General and Technology Solution is functional and non functional Business is - Budget, constraints, legal, branding, policies Technical - Hardware, Software, must interact with our systems Functional - Is the what we are going to do and non functional is how we are going to do it Functional - Data entry, Data entrance, Data maintenance - changes to data. user shall enter name when prompted, user shall change name in the settings - Entrance and maintenance Non functional - Performance - Speed of something Security - Business user personal informational shall be encrypted with apportioned software Avalablility - Solution must be avaible during opening times.

Question 42

The importance of them

Answer 42

Provide consistency, validation and development -

Question 43

To types of documentation styles for requirement

Answer 43

Text based - user stories, requirement catalogue Diagram - Use case, business model, data model

Question 44

Requirement document

Answer 44

Introduction, models, data models, requirements catalogue and appendix

Question 45

What's in a requirement catalogue

Answer 45

ID - Author - date captures - Requirement description - status

Question 46

User stories

Answer 46

Between the product owner and developers AS A I WANT TO SO THAT

Question 47

Explain the rationale for functional requirements

Answer 47

unambiguous communication, generating questions, cross checking for completeness and consistency

Question 48

Describe the purpose of modelling in RE

Answer 48

Communicate and describe the functionality and data requirements

Question 49

Describe a use case model

Answer 49

So, you have the actors and the systems boundary - inside you can see how the actors interact with the system, its usually in oval shape and in side the action - you can record steps/ Dialogue between actor and system - has pre conditions and post conditions There external events that happen with in the system One point of view - should not be confused with a business process, described integrations only with the IT system

Question 50

What relationships does a use case have

Answer 50

Extend and include - that one use case includes the functionality of another use case Extend - Usually extends from a functionality of the another use case but can use a condition - such as when fuel tank is not fall/

Question 51

Class diagram why and what features

Answer 51

Name, attributes and association Customer or order Attributes are like CustomerName OrderDate Association are what class it is assiociated to like Customer car - Customer Owns car - customer can have one or more cars

Question 52

CRUD matrix

Answer 52

Good for cross checking - Create Read update and delete Class - Customer Use Case - Takes payment On the system the customer you recieve what the money Class Account Use Case - Take payment - The account is going to be updated by the payment

Question 53

Stakeholder roles

Answer 53

Business - Project - External Project - Sponsor, SME, Project Manager, Business Analst, Develpers, Testers Business - Business architect, business regulators External - Customers, suppliers, Governance, competitors

Question 54

Validating requirements - Explain the process

Answer 54

So, you're requirements will need to be validated by a sponsor - If there are any safty isssues or risks to budget and scope In an agile development they tend to be less formal as you are working in iterative world, which means you can always go back to them. In a waterfall and linear environment it tends to be more formal Before formal you usually have a domain experts the sponsor the BA the project manager, the developers to review the requirements then during the meeting you would have a scribe, the requirements engineered and moderator at the end you will have 3 options Accept the catalogue in its current form, accept the change and say we will make the changes and trust the change or review the later again once changes have been made.

Question 55

Explain the purpose of analysing requirements

Answer 55

Make sure the are unambiguous, clear and concise, they are testable and tracible - walkthrough with stakeholders and go round until completion

Question 56

How would you prioritise requirements

Answer 56

MoSCoW - Traffic light system Must have Should have Could have Want to have

Question 57

How would you interpret an individual requirement

Answer 57

Overlaps - Remove duplication Make sure requirements are atomic, meaning they can do one item and not lots of things Make sure it has a level priory and acceptance criteria You want it to be unambiguous - Use a glossary - Clear simple language Make sure its traceable, testable, correct and relevant - is it in scope

Question 58

Feasibility study

Answer 58

Business, Tech and Financial Tech - Is there tech already to perform requirement Business - Are the proposal realistic Financial - Is this change need - Sponsor makes final call

Question 59

INVEST attribute to help with user stories

Answer 59

Independent - should stand out on its own Negotiable - should be a basis for elaboration and prioritisation Valuable - must add toward the business gaol Estimable - In terms of size or development effort would take Small Testable

Question 60

Why should we slice requirements agile/linear

Answer 60

So we do this through an interactive manner - So we can go through requirements at a high level and then go through again on a lower level

Question 61

How to analyse business rules

Answer 61

With the business constraints we can use CRUD analyse the data constraints. Decision constraints can be analysed via process models and BAMs

Question 62

How we test testability

Answer 62

Need to make sure the requirements are testable, do we know the pre conditions of the test and post conditions, do we know the require response to expectations

Question 63

Analyse roles

Answer 63

Personas, analyse the customer or business user from creating rules, use design thinking to empathises with the customer. The customer role - Man in 70s Persona - Man don't know how to access his online shopping app Persona goal Stages - throughout the value chain Touch points of how the customer interacts with the business RGA - Customer perception Emotional response - Potential opportunities

Question 64

What is the value change

Answer 64

Inbound logistics - Processes for receiving product Production - turn these materials into something Outbound logistics - Processes that get the product to the customer Marketing - Processes on how we are to market the product, and how we sold the product Customer service - the customer service we provide to the consumer once they have the product Supportive activities - Infrustratre - so the over head management - the fiancés Human resources - Hiring staff, training and development Tech development - so how to market, product design Procurment - how we procure out items with suppliers

Question 65

traceability

Answer 65

vertical that it aligns with our objectives horizontal - aligns back to the source and how and why a particular solution exists

Question 66

How to deal with volatile requirements

Answer 66

They start off as voilatical and are likely to change but as we gain agreement from stakeholder we take them to a workshop involving the sponsor to validate and bassline the requirement so it become permeant and can only be changed by the change control process

Question 67

Change control why would it happen and what to do about it

Answer 67

Change in stakeholdes, change in budget, competitor action,. change legistration. You will have a formal meeting with the change control board - if the requirement is baselined. Document analyse consult and decided whether to do the change or not Change control board could be a senior user, a senior QA rep,

Question 68

Whats the reason to baseline

Answer 68

They can never be overwritten, that are concrete requirements and validated and can only be changed via a control board, you can fall back on this requirement if the change was faulty

Question 69

What's the difference between business systems and IT systems

Answer 69

Business systems - are expressed as processes, sequence of tasks conducted by the roles to meet business requirements IT systems - provides IT services to facilitate the business processes, to meet business goals

Question 70

What's the point in a process

Answer 70

It turns inputs into outputs to perform the work of the organisation - poor processes would lead to high costs, low customer satisfaction low moral and good processes will be the opposite

Question 71

Why model a business process

Answer 71

look for problems, help with efficiency, satisfy a regulator, improve customer service, aids communication between us and the stakeholder

Question 72

What's the hierarchy of a business process

Answer 72

Enterprise level - Event response level and actor task level Enterprise - Is a high level approach, that uses the value stream on how we get a product to market Inbound, production, outbound, market and sales and customer service Event response level - Understand how we react to a response, can be external, internal or time bound, we can do this by UML or BPMN Actor Task - describes what the actor will be doing during that part of the process

Question 73

What is the functional view

Answer 73

General management and then underneath you have the accounts team, production, sales and support Internal perspective, little interest in customer.

Question 74

What is process view

Answer 74

Process view flows through the functional view, its the process of how the company fulfil the order, going through all parts of the functional view They create value to the customer

Question 75

You can use SIPOC for a view of enterprise level, what is SIPOC

Answer 75

Suppliers, inbound, processes, outputs customer

Question 76

Process elements

Answer 76

Swim lanes, you have Actors, events, decision points, timelines, tasks

Question 77

Process element example

Answer 77

Customer wants to buy ticket Trigger - Customer asks to buy ticket Outcome - Customer has ticket to watch film Actor - The box office staff Business rule - Age range, do they have ID, VAT on ticket charging Customer - Cinema

Question 78

Explain the 3 levels again use the analogy of a cinema

Answer 78

Enterprise is the value chain, Procure screen tickets, Make sure we have tickets in our system, have tickets availed to customers, promote track sales, customer service Event response from track sale, Customer buys ticket - box office staff, check id if older enough sell ticket In check ID you can have the tasks,

Question 79

Process measurement

Answer 79

internal mesaures - look at the from a business point of view, how long did it take to this process - cost of rescourse the check avaibility External measures are based on the customer - How long it actualy took them to get there product - qauility number of wrong errors given

Question 80

How would you document steps in a task?

Answer 80

Simple text steps: Actor opens types in ID to access registered Actor finds film Actor clicks on film Or Use case Actor - Takes payment Goal - take payment for issues tickets, Event - Customer asks to buy ticket Pre condition - Box office staff must be present at desk Post condition - The customer is in receipt of valid ticket You can also have text do DOWHILE or DOIF

Question 81

POPIT in Gap analysis

Answer 81

People - Structure Organisation - Culture Processes New IT

Question 82

Describe what is in POPIT

Answer 82

People - Management structure - Skills Motivation, Pay and benefits Organisation - Standard - Policies management structure Processes - Process models, actors, events, tasks , business rules Information - Who we are going to capture Knowledge, data Tech - Hardware, software.

Question 83

How does POPIT help

Answer 83

The staff don't have the skills to make the change The change does not align to our policies as a company The processes don't do support our existing technology

Question 84

Implement business change

Answer 84

Big change - Get rid of IT systems and implement new IT systems Parallel - New processes run in parallel with the old Pilot - A particular part of the business is chosen to test out the change Phased - Next increment is only going to work once the new increment is proven