Question 1

You are coaching Marcy, a new business analyst for your organization, on business analysis processes. Marcy is concerned about the define solution scope process, especially the implementation approach element. Which of the following statements best defines the implementation approach element for Marcy?

Accepted Answer

A)  The implementation approach is described in terms of the major features and functions thatare to be included. 
B)  The implementation approach defines major business and technical dependencies that impose constraints to the effort to deploy the solution. 
C)  The implementation approach describes the new capabilities required to meet the business need. 
D)  The implementation approach describes how the chosen solution approach will deliver the solution scope.

Question 2

You are the business analyst for the NHQ Organization. Management has asked that you examine the workflow and internal processes for order fulfillment. Specifically, they'd like you to complete an in-depth analysis and documentation of the business problems and opportunities that may be exist for the organization. What business analysis knowledge area does this activity map to?

Accepted Answer

A)  Requirements elicitation 
B)  Solution assessment and validation 
C)  Enterprise analysis 
D)  Requirements management and communication

Question 3

A business analyst (BA) has just completed a number of elicitation activities and is preparing to review the stated requirements. As part of this, the BA is checking the compliance of the stated requirements with organizational standards for business analysis. What state is the BA attempting to move the requirements into?

Accepted Answer

A)  Validated 
B)  Verified 
C)  Accepted 
D)  Specified

Question 4

What portion of the communications model could be defined as the translator?

Accepted Answer

A)  Receiver 
B)  Medium 
C)  Translator 
D)  Sender

Question 5

A large insurance company wants to buy a new claims processing system or upgrade one of its two existing systems. Each year the claims department is given a $3,5 million budget to spend. Time is of the essence since there are some regulatory changes that will be coming the following year that will require several features that currently neither one of the two claims systems currently support. There are eight stakeholders involved in this initiative. There are local to where the claim systems are managed, while five are located across the country. The business analyst (BA) struggled to get all stakeholders to agree on the desired features but ultimately got agreement on ten identified key features for the new claims systems. The BA was able to build a current state and future state process model which included all ten key features. System A processes 75% of the company's claims. It is 5 years old and the claim processors love it because it is easy to use. However it must go offline for two hours each day. The code is very modular so it does have flexibility to be modified. To upgrade system A to have all ten features it would cost %5 million. System A would be at capacity if it were to process all of the company's claims. System B processes 25% of the company's claims. It is an older mainframe system, but rarely goes offline. It could easily handle double the number of claims that system A processes. However, it has a lot of legacy code and would cost $6 million to upgrade. Both systems have some of the ten desired key features. But neither system has all ten. The cost to buy a new system would be $7 million. Below is the estimated cost for each feature in priority order.  During elicitation the BA must understand the non-functional requirements. What non-functional requirements does System B support over System A?

Accepted Answer

A)  Compatibility 
B)  Scalability 
C)  Compliance 
D)  Usability

Question 6

Which of the following is a table of all stakeholders showing the mapping of which stakeholders will contribute information to other stakeholders?

Accepted Answer

A)  RACI Chart 
B)  Communications Requirements Matrix 
C)  Project scope statement 
D)  Organizational Breakdown Structure

Question 7

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. After the 12 months 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 spend 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 promotion 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 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 100 claims that were filed over the 12 month pilot period. The BA found the nearly 90% of the claim field 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 stored at the top giving the customer a more personalized experience. What type of recommendation has the BA made to the business sponsor?

Accepted Answer

A)  Identify additional capabilities 
B)  Reduce complexity of interfaces 
C)  Perform organizational change. 
D)  Retire the solution

Question 8

A company that specialized in manufacturing vending machines for books has been in business for 10 years. As the e-book and online retailing grow, the company perceived that a change is required to respond to the new emerging market forces. However, the change should focus on reusability as much as possible to reduce expenses. After analyzing the current state with the business subject matter experts, the business analyst (BA) proposed investing in a new business line of vending machines that sell pay per use mobile device phone fast charging stations. Due to the urgency of this change, the BA was asked to finalize requirements elicitation in the shortest possible time. The BA was able to complete requirements elicitation activities in a short period of time. Which type of elicitation approach did the BA use?

Accepted Answer

A)  Experiment 
B)  Collaborative 
C)  Estimation 
D)  Research

Question 9

A business analyst (BA) has engaged various groups from across the organization to define the business opportunity a potential project will address. The BA must consolidate the information collected from the groups. The BA should ensure the business needs __________.

Accepted Answer

A)  are traceable to their source stakeholders. 
B)  are articulated from the enterprise perspective. 
C)  describe the potential solutions that they will satisfy. 
D)  have minimal risk associated with them.

Question 10

What plan will describe the stakeholder groups, communication needs, and the level of formality that is appropriate for the requirements?

Accepted Answer

A)  Requirements management plan 
B)  Project management plan 
C)  Scope management plan 
D)  Business analysis communication plan

Question 11

Which of the following is described in the statement below? "It shows the history and pattern of variation. It is a line graph that shows data points plotted in the order in which they occur. They show trends in a process over time, variation over time, or declines or improvements in a process over time. Trend analysis is performed using them."

Accepted Answer

A)  Cause and effect diagram 
B)  Histogram 
C)  Run chart 
D)  Pareto chart

Question 12

Which of the following graphical presentations of a project plan is most appropriate for presenting to upper management?

Accepted Answer

A)  Pie chart 
B)  Pareto Chat 
C)  Critical Path Method 
D)  Scatter chart

Question 13

Which of the following processes is must at the end of each project phase to determine the completeness of the project work and to gain the customer's acceptance to move the project forward?

Accepted Answer

A)  Scope verification 
B)  Inspection of key results 
C)  Quality control 
D)  Phase gate review

Question 14

An innovative pizza restaurant announces a new pizza topping each week. Once advertised, the new topping on the regular dough constitutes the sole pizza type offered during the week. No other pizza toppings are offered. Which of the following processes is a strong candidate to be addressed while planning for requirements reuse?

Accepted Answer

A)  Dough preparation 
B)  Toppings preparation 
C)  Topping recipes 
D)  Ad images

Question 15

You are completing the requirements for vendor selection and need to create a procurement form that will ask the vendor to provide only a price for commercial-off-the-shelf solution. What type of procurement form will you need to provide to the vendor?

Accepted Answer

A)  Request for proposal 
B)  Purchase order 
C)  Request for information 
D)  Request for quote

Question 16

You are the business analyst for your organization. You have identified the costs and level of effort needed for each of the solution components. Management has asked that you also assess the most effective tradeoffs between delivery options. You consider the available resources and the constraints on the solution to determine if an additional investment is justified to realize a higher value for the solution. What other consideration could you include in your assessment of the solution?

Accepted Answer

A)  Historical information 
B)  Dependencies between requirements 
C)  Experience of the implementation team 
D)  Enterprise environmental factors

Question 17

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).  What is the company's primary business objective in this scenario?

Accepted Answer

A)  Make more profit 
B)  Defeat competitors 
C)  Satisfy the customer 
D)  Stabilize its performance

Question 18

Before investing further in the project, a customer and the key stakeholders of the project want to be able to visualize the final product. Which elicitation technique should the business analyst (BA) select?

Accepted Answer

A)  Interface Analysis 
B)  Prototyping 
C)  Observation 
D)  Reverse Engineering

Question 19

Which of the following defines the deliverable the customer is expecting?

Accepted Answer

A)  Project charter 
B)  Procurement management plan 
C)  Product scope statement 
D)  Project network diagram

Question 20

Donna is leading a brainstorming session for her organization. She has asked the participants in this group to come up with at least ten ideas for possible solutions to an identified problem. What is the problem with setting the goal as ten ideas for possible solutions in this session?

Accepted Answer

A)  The goal should be to come up with as many solutions as possible, not just ten ideas. 
B)  The goal should be to generate ten ideas within a set time period. 
C)  The goal should be to come up with the best solution for the problem, not ten ideas. 
D)  The goal should be to include everyone's input to the solutions.

Exam 1: Certified Business Analysis Professional