IIBA CBAP - Certified Business Analysis Professional

A major manufacturer of popular beverages has appointed a local distributor to serve a specific territory. The demand for the beverages has a pronounced seasonal pattern. The distributor performs well overall, but is repeatedly unable to keep up with fulfilling many customer orders during peak demand periods. The distributor's current delivery capability is stretched to deliver 60 tons of merchandise per day whereas the season's peak demand periods need a daily delivery capability of up to 100 tons.

The distributor is under pressure to fully meet the year-round market demand in order to stay in business. The distributor's management wants to identify and consider more cost-effective options as resorting to adding more trucks and drivers would not be economically feasible.

A business analyst (BA) has spent several days observing and measuring the warehouse activities to understand the situation and to gain insights into possible solutions. The delivery workflow is a four-step process: (1) picking the orders and assembling them on trays, (2) bringing the trays to the loading bay, (3) loading the orders into trucks, and (4) delivering the orders to customers. As the following table illustrates, overall performance depends is dependent on five major resources: (1) the workers who pick the orders and load them into trucks, (2) the tallyers who check the orders, (3) the drivers, (4) the trucks, and (5) eight loading bays (LBs).

Each truck can only make two trips a day. The BA has noticed that only 30% of trips have their orders available for loading when a truck arrives. Otherwise the truck has to wait one extra hour until the orders are picked and brought to the loading bay.

If trucks are the only constraint, approximately how many hours are lost due to this downtime?

The business analyst (BA) is preparing to determine the impact of various risks associated with the business analysis effort currently underway.

Which of the following would the BA use as an input into the assessment of risk?

A health insurance provider undertakes enhancements to its mobile application platform and finalizes the following capabilities as part of the scope of the next release:

I.Ability to integrate online maps and global positioning system (GPS) technology with the mobile application in real time to display location of service providers in the subscriber's vicinity that participate in the subscriber's plan network.

II.Ability for the subscriber to lookup the service providers by specifying either a postal code or a search area radius in miles.

III.Ability for the subscriber to initiate the download of fee information for one or more service providers in a single request.

Through requirements workshops the business analyst elicits the following detailed business requirements:

1.The company's mobile application platform must support real time integration with the following third party systems:

A ) GPS System

B ) Postal Code Validation

2.The service providers available for selection must participate in the subscriber's medical plan network as of the current system date.

3.The map display shall highlight the boundary of the search area with a dotted yellow line.

4.The extent and shape of the search area shall be determined based on one of the following user choices:

A ) Postal code – Subscriber location acquired from GPS shall be used to determine and populate the related postal code as the default postal code with options for the user to change the postal code.

B ) Radius for the search area around the subscriber's location, that will have default value of 5 miles. The radius can be changed by the subscriber with a maximum range of 50 miles.

5.Subscriber shall be able to select one of the options above and supply corresponding input.

6.System shall validate the user input and display appropriate error messages if invalid.

7.Based on the inputs and the plan of the subscriber, the system shall retrieve information for the participating service providers that are located within the designated search area.

8.System shall display a map including visual markers to indicate locations of the service providers in the top half of the device screen and a list of the same service providers in the bottom half of the device screen.

9.The list of service providers shall include the Name, Phone Number and Street Address.

10.If the subscriber specified the radius or retained the default postal code for the search area, the list shall additionally include the approximate driving distance in miles from the subscriber's last registered location and the list shall be sorted in the ascending order of the driving distance.

11.The subscriber shall be able to select a service provider either from the list or from the map and download a document that contains the name, contact telephone, email address, fax number and the fee schedule for the covered services applicable to the subscriber's plan.

Which of the following characteristics is violated by requirement 5?

A very large insurer of General Liability and Property Damage insurance has an upward trend of increased claims over the past 5 years.

The Risk Control Area for that company has just completed a 12 month Pilot of a new improved Risk Control Site.

The purpose of the site is to help their customers manage their exposures and ideally prevent them from having claims There were 100 customers that were part of the Pilot that represented 25 different industries. The business goals were to increase use of the site and provide tools to help customer awareness of their exposures, so that they may reduce existing exposures and ultimately reduce claims.

The sites Features were as follows:

* Improvements to the search engine to all customers to search for articles, tools and services on the site

* A checklist function that allow customer to create their own unique Checklists or utilize a sample provided by ABC company to use daily, weekly etc for an area of their facility.

* A promotion feature - where Risk preventing Articles, and tools on the site are marketed toward a customer.

* A profile section allowing for Customer Name, Address and contact Phone number.

Alter the 12 month pilot the business sponsor received an assessment of what was working and what was not. The Assessment of the pilot revealed overall site activity had significantly increased, however only 5% of the time the promotions were viewed. And the most shocking was that total claims increased by nearly 20% for these 100 customers during the pilot period. The business sponsor was perplexed as he had an expectation of reduced claims and at least for 30% viewing of promotions since the project team had spent a lot of careful time and effort on this feature. A BA was assigned to do further analysis regarding the low use of the promotions and why claims were not being reduced.

Regarding the use of promotions the BA looked into other similar companies to see what they did differently to get their customer to look at their promotions. The BA found that similar companies had promotions that targeted the industry the customer was in so it was more relevant to them and they were more interested to view the promotion. In addition the BA sent out a survey to all 100 pilot customers asking probing questions about what they thought of the site and if they felt it had decreased their exposure to risk sufficiently. The Survey responses came back with raving positive comments and providing examples of how the site had been helping in the reduction of claims from the customer's perspective. In addition the survey also revealed insight that the customers found the promotion often irrelevant to their industry.

The BA asked for a dump of all documentation of the 1000 claims that were filed over the 12 month pilot period. The BA found the nearly 90% of the claim filed were all in one region of the country and were all for property damage related to several severe winter storms in the region and the claims were nearly all unavoidable by the customers. The BA brought all this analysis back to the business sponsor and made the recommendation to the business sponsor to require the customer to select 1 of 25 industries in their profile. This would in turn allow for the ability to show industry specific promotions and promote search results relative to a customer's industry to be sorted at the top giving the customer a more personalized experience.

What was the business sponsor looking to validate about the use of promotions?

An organization has a procedure for receiving requests from its customers: investigating each and then replying with an answer. The general manager asks a business analyst (BA) to identify ways to improve the current practice because it takes too long for the requests to be answered.

Which of the following techniques will the BA use to review the tasks?

In order to align with the added value required from the parcel tracking solution, what would be an important requirements' category for the BA to give more focus?

A business analyst (BA) wants to estimate the potential value delivered by a set of requirements and design options by targeting a small group of stakeholders to understand their perceived value and expectations. The BA is going to organize a discussion during which feedback is collected.

Which technique will be used?

Company A is a nation-wide leader in commercial demolition. Having just celebrated its 100th year of operations, the company decided to begin doing work internationally. The current system used for reporting company finances is unable to keep pace with the potential demands of doing work in geographically dispersed locations. Therefore, the company decided to replace its client-based Profit & Loss (P&L) reporting system with a more robust, web-based system. This will ensure transparency across the organization and enable better decision making.

The business analyst (BA) at Company A has recently completed several rounds of elicitation to determine the requirements for the new, web-based system. Over 1250 requirements were elicited. An initial Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM) has been drafted, and a subset of the RTM can be seen below:

While verifying the requirements, the BA notices that Requirement ID NFO0003 does not meet the "unambiguous" or the "testable" characteristics of requirements quality. The BA plans to re-write the requirement.

Which of the following requirements is both unambiguous and testable?

The BA is working on the design options for the future state at the martial arts organization. There are several design elements that need to be considered for the future state. Which of the following design elements does the Activity Diagram address?

A software development company is in the process of creating a new product for their customer base. It has been several years since such a project has been initiated and the organization has created a new team to own and develop the product. The project team will be evaluated by the successful adoption of the product, which will be developed over the next 12 months.

The team's business analyst (BA) has analyzed the current state in partnership with the product owner and

has been meeting with senior management to identify the goals that need to be attained. A broad view of the business has been analyzed in order to have an understanding of how the company is currently providing value to its customer base.

What has the BA been identifying that will be used to evaluate the solution?