The technology team at a financial institution has successfully constructed a software application to be deployed as part of a digital banking strategy. A business analyst (BA) has completed a review of the current state description and now needs to evaluate the solution and determine limiting factors for value realization.
What additional input is required to perform the assessment of enterprise limitations?
A business unit of a transnational manufacturer wants to implement a robust process for addressing integrity- critical equipment deterioration incidents. Timely and complete resolution of such incidents is vital for the business unit’s continuous safe and profitable operation. Treating each incident involves many employees from different departments extensively collaborating and exchanging information. That information is spread across multiple systems having their access limited to particular user groups. With the current manual process, some incidents get forgotten and remain unresolved for years.
The project’s Sponsor is an Equipment Integrity and Reliability Advisor, who moved into this position from another business unit. That business unit implemented a proprietary application to integrate the information and to assist in tracking and managing the incidents. Having a positive experience with the application, the Sponsor is suggesting to customize it and reuse in the new business unit.
The business unit’s Enterprise Architect (EA), who is responsible for assessing solution options and presenting them to executive decision makers, has a few concerns with adopting the existing application. The application uses point-to-point interfaces with other data sources whereas the business unit’s target architecture relies on a data warehouse-based integration. Moreover, the two business units use different legacy systems, as well as different front-end implementation technologies. Additionally, the existing application is monolingual, while the business unit needs user interfaces and some data to be presented in two languages. With all of this, it may be easier to build a new application from scratch than to customize the existing one. To understand which option is better, the EA asks a business analyst (BA) to define business requirements.
Through the elicitation process, the BA identifies the following requirement: "Particular incident-related activities require approval by authorized personnel before beginning them, as well as confirmation of acceptance of their completion."
What kind of asset should the BA provide to fully specify the approval requirement?
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?
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?
A national branch of a global company is struggling to improve business processes of its Public and Government Affairs (PGA) department. To work with external stakeholders effectively, PGA employees need to collect, manage, and exchange a vast amount of information. Complex cases involve collaboration of many employees from different departments. The ability to share information and to coordinate corresponding activities is crucial for the company's growth plans. Their current tools and practices do not serve the purpose well. The existing system, which was deployed a couple of years ago, has only a few active users. The majority of PGA employees avoid using it because the system is hard to use and lacks needed functionality. Consequently, available information is mostly unstructured and stored either locally or on a shared network drive. Some of the information exists only in a paper form.
The branch's PGA head, who sponsors the project, wants to implement a configurable solution that two other branches successfully deployed several months ago. Both deployments were done by three solution
consultants, who will be available to assist in the project. They will be responsible for tailoring the solution to PGA needs, as well as for training the PGA staff. With their help, the sponsor plans to complete the project in approximately three months.
The solution consultants reside in another country 7 hours ahead of the rest of the project team. They will be available part-time, but are planning two one-week long trips to the PGA central office to conduct initial training and to participate in the final deployment of the system into production. The consultants, in turn, expect a business analyst (BA) to assist in collecting necessary data and defining customization requirements.
What should define the timing of business analysis work in this project?
A financial institution engaged in mortgage lending has embarked on a business process improvement initiative to eliminate the activities that hinder growth to ultimately improve the success rate of its mortgage business. As a benchmark for identification, the institution is keen on improving any business process that has less than a 75% success rate. The institution has appointed a business analyst (BA) to review the business transactions for the processes of origination, payments, and closures, as well as identify opportunities for improvements and recommend solutions.
The BA has collected the following information over the last three months pertaining to these business processes:
•All the business processes are at their maximum capacity in terms of the current number of transactions.
•Each business process has a certain number of rejects and the reasons for rejection include documentation, verification, collateral, and funding. Funding rejects occur when the bank's customers have failed to make payment of their mortgage processing fee or mortgage closure payment.
The BA has also recommended the use of documentation checklists as a solution to eliminate the documentation rejects.
If an additional recommendation to reduce Verification Rejects by 50% were to be introduced into the mortgage origination process, what is the potential success rate of the mortgage origination process?
A company finalized the implementation of a new, corporate-wide database. After nearly three months of operation, the solution is repeatedly producing invalid outputs. A business analyst (BA) has been asked to investigate the solution's problem. The BA has been able to find several instances where the outputs from the solution are below an acceptable level of quality.
Which of the following techniques should the BA use to identify the solution limitations?
A national branch of a global company is struggling to improve business processes of its Public and Government Affairs (PGA) department. To work with external stakeholders effectively, PGA employees need to collect, manage, and exchange a vast amount of information. Complex cases involve collaboration of many employees from different departments. The ability to share information and to coordinate corresponding activities is crucial for the company's growth plans. Their current tools and practices do not serve the purpose well. The existing system, which was deployed a couple of years ago, has only a few active users. The majority of PGA employees avoid using it because the system is hard to use and lacks needed functionality. Consequently, available information is mostly unstructured and stored either locally or on a shared network drive. Some of the information exists only in a paper form.
The branch's PGA head, who sponsors the project, wants to implement a configurable solution that two other branches successfully deployed several months ago. Both deployments were done by three solution consultants, who will be available to assist in the project. They will be responsible for tailoring the solution to PGA needs, as well as for training the PGA staff. With their help, the sponsor plans to complete the project in approximately three months.
The solution consultants reside in another country 7 hours ahead of the rest of the project team. They will be available part-time, but are planning two one-week long trips to the PGA central office to conduct initial training and to participate in the final deployment of the system into production. The consultants, in turn, expect a business analyst (BA) to assist in collecting necessary data and defining customization requirements.
The solution consultants have composed a set of as-is solution documents. A spreadsheet contains a catalog of brief definitions of all requirements with priorities assigned to them. A separate document explains data models and user interfaces. For the new and changed requirements, the BA wants to capture additional attributes such as the source, reason, complexity, and priority of change. Some of these requirements can be reused in other work.
How should information for these requirements be managed?
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:
The BA will create a Data Model to meet which requirement?
During a prioritization meeting, a business analyst (BA) mentioned that the access management system requirements are not stable. The project manager and a team lead proposed removing the requirements from discussion. A domain subject matter expert (SME) insisted on making that requirement a high priority, because it is really important from their point of view.
What should the BA do?
