You are the business analyst for your organization. Management has asked you to create a plan that will define the proposed structure and schedule for communicating the business analysis activities to the appropriate stakeholders.
What plan does management want you to create?
Mark is the business analyst for his organization. He is working with the solution development team and he believes that the team does not want to implement a certain portion of the requirements. The team is expressing the difficulty of the requirements and how it will be extremely challenging to complete. When Mark asks about a similar project that the team completed, they insist that this is a different type of requirements though Mark believes that it is not.
What is the solution development team appearing to do to the requirements?
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?
After releasing its beta version of a travel assistance mobile application, a travel company has received feedback from a public survey proposing new features. The company is struggling with the large number of ideas and would like to make a decision on which to consider in the next implementation cycle.
Which of the following considerations should be used first for filtering ideas?
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).
If the driver's average throughput is 0.6 tons/hour, how many hours per day would 15 drivers have to work to deliver 100 tons of merchandise?
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 type of recommendation has the BA made to the business sponsor?
A business analyst (BA) is preparing to specify requirements. Various attributes can be specified for each requirement or set of requirements.
Which approach contains a suitable set of attributes?
You are the business analyst for your organization and are currently with several key stakeholders as part of the determination of which business analysis approach is most appropriate for the current project.
Which one of the following is not a stakeholder that is considered when completing the business analysis planning and monitoring task to determine a business analysis approach?