The Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP)

A popular department store chain wants to make computer upgrades as well as conduct a major remodeling effort to increase revenue to all their 100 stores over the next 2 years. The remodeling will occur in two phases. The two phases are required at each store and can be completed in any order, but each phase must be fully completed before the next phase can begin. Phase 1 will take approximately 32 weeks and will not require a store to be temporarily closed. Phase 2 will take approximately 20 weeks and will require a store to be temporarily closed.

In order to keep inventory level and total revenue for the department store chain at an operational level, 75% of the stores must remain open to the public at all times. Against the board of director ' s advice, the Chief

Executive Officer (CEO) made a decision to start and complete the top 25 revenue-producing stores in the first year to get those stores remodeled and fully operational.

A business analyst (BA) has been brought in to help with planning the project and gathering requirements. Based on the CEO ' s executive decision, which risk tolerance attitude is the CEO exhibiting?

An insurance company wants to increase sales by 15% and customer retention by 10% within 1 calendar year.

Various strategies to achieve this were considered and a restructure to the existing pricing model is selected to help achieve these goals.

A business analyst (BA) works with stakeholders such as actuaries, product specialists, sales staff, risk managers, and underwriters who agree to applying varying levels of discounts to customers based on:

• Total annual premium the customer has with the company (Financial worth)

• Time with the insurance company (Loyalty)

Various financial models are considered but the stakeholders agree that an initial applicable discount is determined based on the customer ' s overall premium:

The percentage of the maximum possible discount available to the customer is adjusted based on time with the company:

If within the first six months, customer retention increased by 5 % and sales increased by 6%, then when will the desired sales and retention goals be achieved assuming the trend continues at the same pace?

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?

A non-profit utility company has 900 employees, a majority of whom are hourly employees and must track their time using a paper based process. A few years ago, the Director of Human Resources purchased a software system to eliminate the current paper-based time reporting process. No requirements specific to the utility company were defined prior to the purchase. A team was formed to implement the software During implementation process, the team discovered the software lacked functionality and was not robust enough to support the general ledger requirements The company stopped the effort and incurred a $500,000 USD loss on the cost of the software.

This year, the Director of Finance requested that a team investigate the current paper-based time reporting process and recommend solutions. The Director of Finance feels that the Director of Human Resources must be involved as a critical stakeholder. The Director of Human Resources is still bitter about the last effort because the process stopped ' .

Which of the following is included in performing a stakeholder analysis?

A leading software manufacturing company has appointed a business analyst (BA) to ensure that requirements are managed effectively and efficiently. The BA discovered some missing functionality as well as some implemented functionality which are not supported by requirements.

Which of the following tasks did the BA use to discover the issues?

An organization is trying to streamline its current processes to improve performance and reduce costs. A business analyst (BA) conducted a process improvement workshop and identified the following issues as the top three items to be addressed:

1: There are multiple teams to define systems, functionality, and content, in many instances, multiple teams are defining the same Functionalities while other functionalities are not being defined at all. leading to unclear understanding of business requirements

2: Product specification forms are published each year. A comparison tool is used to evaluate specification differences between yearly releases; but does not adequately identify changes between versions and needs to be improved.

3: Training consists of a new team member shadowing a seasoned team member. There are no written training materials or formal training sources therefore training is inconsistent and not meeting the needs of the organization.

The BA learns that formal training programs are not often devised for teams as small and diverse as this team, but still believes it is a viable solution to the training need. What type of analysis would help the BA gain approval to proceed with creating this type of training program for this team?

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.

After the BA completed the initial analysis, the information is reviewed with leadership. At this point in the project, what will the BA be presenting?

A business analyst (BA) has been given a defect during user acceptance testing. After analyzing the defect, the BA determines it is a change in the requirement.

What does the BA need to do to assess the change?

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.

Assuming the BA ' s recommendation to be true, what will be the new success rate of the mortgage closure process?