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?
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?
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 is working on identifying additional improvement opportunities based on these requirements. Which of the following improvement opportunities is reflected in Requirement ID NFP0002?
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 spreadsheet with all requirements that are already implemented in the solution. The requirements in the catalog are organized partially by user tasks and partially by system features. The branch has distinct definitions of PGA user roles and uses a different approach to structuring requirements specifications.
How should the BA organize the customization requirements?
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:
As the new pricing structure was being implemented, the chief executive officer (CEO) of the company wanted to change the premiums and associated discounts offered to customers. The BA investigated the cost, anticipated benefits and the length of time the change would likely take to complete before presenting the results back to the CEO.
What type of analysis has the BA just conducted?
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 business analyst (BA) is planning for an upcoming solution based on a signed contract with a client but has learned that one of the key subject matter experts is unavailable during the first half of the business analysis phase. The project has a tight timeline and firm deadline that is part of the contract. There are no substitutes for the key subject matter expert.
How should the BA proceed?
Most users of a pilot application have experienced more efficient processing compared to the old system. However, the business analyst (BA) has observed that a few people took much longer to complete the process. The system event log shows that those users encountered errors when they attempted to sign on.
Which of the following would the BA recommend to improve overall performance?
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'.
During a brainstorming session on improvement opportunities, the Director of Human Resources repeatedly interrupts the group and states why the proposed ideas will not work.
Which approach should the business analyst (BA) take to refocus the group?
A business analyst (BA) is working on a payment system (PS) implementation. A set of systems which should interact with a new system has been identified. The business analyst defined that a user with role of "Supervisor" in the PS must pass a two-factor authentication before an execution of the functions: "Change system parameters" and "Set up new supervisor." A user must have the role of "Supervisor" to use the standard functions "Send mail notification" or "Send SMS notification".
The BA defined the following use cases:
•"Change system parameters"
•"Setup new supervisor"
•"Send mail notification"
•"Send SMS notification"
•"Send notification"
•"Pass a two-factor authentication"
The BA wants to create a Use Case diagram.
Which technique should be used to define a communications protocol between the PS and other systems?
TESTED 04 Apr 2025
