1. As a Business Analyst what is your role in an organization?

Ans:

A Business Analyst plays a vital role in a project for an organization.

i) The main role of a Business Analyst is to find out the needs of an organization, finding out their problems, even predicting the future issues to an extent and suggesting the suitable solutions for the same and drive through the organization’s achievements.

ii) Business Analyst role varies from organization to organization, project to project and even from domain to domain.

iii) BA in a project can play the role of a Business Planner, System Analyst, Data Analyst, Organization Analyst, Application Designer, Subject Area Expert, Technical Architect etc.

iv) Core skills of a BA are a good grip on system engineering concepts, leadership qualities, technical knowledge, writing and verbal communications.

v) BA’s job may vary as per the employer’s requirement like some are limited to IT projects, even few of them extend their responsibilities to areas such as finance, marketing, accounting etc.

2.How will you be able to handle the changes to requirements?

Ans:

This is a logical question asked in an interview. As a BA, first I’ll get signed a document by the user which states that after a point of time no changes to the requirements are accepted.

In few cases, if the changes to the requirements are accepted then as a BA,

i) Firstly I’ll note down the changes made to the requirements and will prioritize them.

ii) Will also go through those changes and find out the impact of them on the project.

iii) Will calculate the cost, timeline, and resources required to cover the impact of change requirements in the project.

iv) And will make sure that whether those changes affect or create gaps to functional design documents, testing or coding.

3.Can you name the tools that are helpful for business analysis?

Ans:

The process performed by a BA is termed as Business Analysis. The tools used by a BA are Rational tools, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, Power Point, MS Project, ERP systems.

4.What is meant by Benchmarking?

Ans:

The process of measuring the quality of policies, programs, products, rules and other measures of an organization against the standard measures or against the other companies is termed as Benchmarking. This is used to the measure the performance of a company to compete in the industry.

The main purpose of benchmarking is to find out the areas of improvement in a company and to analyze how the neighbor companies are achieving their goals.

5.How can you say that a requirement is good or perfect?

Ans:

The features and standards of a good requirement can be pointed out using a rule called SMART rule.

Specific – The description of a requirement should be perfect and specific enough to understand it.

Measurable – There are various parameters through which the requirement’s success can be measured.

Attainable – Resources should be able to achieve success with the requirement.

Relevant – States that what results are realistically achieved.

Timely – Requirements of a project should be revealed in time.

6. What makes you unique from others?

Ans:

The answer to this question will test your experience, skills, and individuality. “I am technically sound and can make a strong relationship with the customer. With this unique combination, I can use my knowledge and information to build a user-friendly environment”.

7.What are the tasks that are not part of a BA’s job?

Ans:

i) A Business Analyst is not intended to organize the project team meetings.

ii) A Business Analyst should not bother regarding the risks and issues tracker of a project.

iii) A Business Analyst should not perform activities like testing (executing the TC’s), coding or programming.

8.Differentiate a Risk and an issue?

Ans:

Risk is not hing but a problem or something that can be predicted earlier so that some improvement plans are used to handle them. Whereas an ‘Issue’ means the risk that had happened or occurred.

The role of a BA is not to solve the issue instead should suggest some plans to control the loss/damage caused. And this should be marked as a precautionary measure for other projects.

Example: On some roads, there are few caution boards stating that “Road under repair, take diversion”. This is called as Risk.

If we travel through the same route which is under repair, then there caused some damage to the vehicle. This is called as an issue.

9.List out the documents that are used by a BA in a Project?

Ans:

As a Business Analyst we deal with various documents like Functional Specification document, Technical Specification document, Business requirement document, Use case diagram, Requirement Traceability Matrix etc.

10.What is a misuse case?

Ans:

An activity performed by a user which in turn causes system failure. It may be a malicious activity. As it is misguiding the system function flow, it is termed as misuse case.

11.How can you handle and manage the difficult stakeholders?

Ans:

Dealing with difficult stakeholders is a major task for a BA. There are many ways to handle such situations, few important points to be noted among them are listed below.

i) Identify that difficult stakeholder among the group of stakeholders, listen and concentrate on their point of view with patience. Be polite to them and do not close off the conversation immediately with such people.

ii) Generally, a stakeholder will be difficult because they are not comfortable with few things in the project. So listen to them and answer such difficult stakeholders in a diplomatic way.

iii) Find out a way to meet them personally and have a one on one discussion. By this, you can show your commitment towards them.

iv) Try to find out and resolve their motivations like are they worried about the budget of the project or Curious about the project whether it is turning exactly as per their vision etc.

v) Continuously engage such difficult stakeholders and make them understand that their contribution is much value for the project.

12.When can a BA say that the requirements are done?

Ans:

Requirements are considered as complete when they satisfy the below criteria

i) Requirements should be aligned with the objectives of a business. It means that the views of business stakeholders should align with the needs to be built for the project.

ii) All the possible views and ideas of key stakeholders are to be extracted.

iii) A quality of the requirements should meet/satisfy the organization’s set of criteria’s through which the quality of the requirements is tested.

iv) One can say that the requirements are complete when they could be done with in the possible available resources.

v) All the stakeholders of the project should be in consent with the gathered requirements.

13.Brief the difference between Fish model and V model?

Ans:
Fish model consumes more time in dealing with requirements when compared to V model. Even Fish model is a bit expensive than V model. Generally, a Fish model is preferred when there are no uncertainties in the requirements.

14.Which model is better than Waterfall model and Spiral Model?

Ans:

Selecting the life cycle model for a project is based on its type, scope, and limitations. It is solely dependent on the culture of the organization, their terms, and conditions, policies, a process of developing the system etc.

15.Differentiate an alternate flow and exception flow of a use case diagram?

Ans:

Basic flow represents the activities carrying out in order as required by the business. Alternate flow represents actions that are performed apart from the basic flow and also be considered as an optional flow. Whereas Exception flow is executed in a case or any errors.

Example: When we open a login page of any website, there is a link “forgot password” to retrieve the password. This is called as alternate flow.

In the same login page if we enter the correct username and password, sometimes we get an error message stating “404 error”. This is called the exception flow.

16.What does INVEST means?

Ans:

INVEST means Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Sized Appropriately, Testable. With this INVEST process, the project managers and technical teams are able to deliver the good quality of the product and can provide quality service.

17.What all steps are included in developing a product from a basic idea?

Ans:

In the process of developing a product from an idea, there are many steps to be followed as below,

Market Analysis – This is a business plan through which the characteristics of a market have been studied, like how the market changes and behaves dynamically.

SWOT Analysis – This is a process through which the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of an organization are identified.

Personas – These are typical users of websites or intranet who represents the goals and characteristics of various large groups of users. Personas replicate the real users in functional design.

Competitor Analysis – Evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of outside competitors.

Strategic Vision and Feature set – The process of developing the goals in present and planning to achieve the same in future by moving towards the vision.

Prioritize Features – All the features of the product that is to be developed are prioritized by the product management to help the development team.

Apart from the above-mentioned steps, there are furthermore terms involved in the process of developing a product. They are Use case, SDLC, Storyboards, Test Cases, Monitoring, and Scalability.

18.Define Pareto Analysis?

Ans:

Pareto Analysis is a proper technique used in decision-making for quality control activities and also used in tracing out the resolutions for defects. Basically, it is categorized as a decision-making technique based on its statistics that, with a limited number of selected inputs we can have a great impact on the outcome.

It is also termed as 80/20 rule because as per this analysis 80% of the benefits of a project are achieved from 20% of the work.

20.Can you brief Kano Analysis?

Ans:

Kano analysis is a powerful technique used in classifying the various types of customer requirements of new products. Basically, this Kano Analysis deals with the needs of the end user’s of the product.

The main attributes of this Kano Analysis are

i) Threshold Attributes – These are the properties that a customer wants to be available in the product.

ii) Performance Attributes – These represent some extra properties that are not necessary for a product but can be added for customers enjoyment.

iii) Excitement Attributes – These are the properties that the customers are not aware of but are excited when they found such properties in their product.