Business Analyst Interview Questions With Answers

What is business analysis? One should not restrict the BA role to only being a link between Non-It and IT or only for development projects.A BA is someone who is able to bring in improvements, changes (technology, process, people etc.) in an efficient manner. So a BA could be part of the marketing team who helps the marketing team in providing estimates/high level solutions for a said project which is under the process of procurement. Or he could be someone involved during the Requirement gathering/analysis once the project is initiated. Or he could be someone who brings profit to the company by performing process improvement activities ROIs at process level.Last but not the least BAs could be domain specific as well. What are Typical process steps to Conduct Feasiblity Study? Based on the size and/or complexity of the situation, the study effort may be broken down into smaller, more manageable pieces and prioritized accordingly. The typical process steps to conducting a feasibility study include those outlined below. It must be noted that these steps are often be conducted concurrently, iteratively and, in fact, some steps may be omitted entirely, depending on the complexity and criticality of the effort. Process steps include: * Determine requirements for the study * Determine objectives, scope and approach, and plan the effort * Conduct a current state assessment * Identify potential solutions Determine the feasibility of each option * Document and communicate the results of the study, and obtain approval to develop the Business Case for the recommended solution. Knowledge and Skills needed for a Business Analyst to conduct Feasibility Analysis? Ideally individual(s) will have broad experience in business and IT, understand the concept of project value and what it may mean to their organization. In addition, the Business Analyst needs to understand: * Financial analysis to evaluate the viability of a potential solution

* The industry and the organizational vision, mission, and strategic goals, as well as organizational policies and procedures that may affect the study or be affected by the change initiative under study * A broad, not deep, understanding of the IT infrastructure that supports the business Skills Due to the wide range of techniques that are used when conducting a major feasibility study, the Business Analyst may not possess all of the skills required to plan and execute the study. Therefore, the Business Analyst must enlist a team of experts to provide the skills required, including: * Research and information analysis skills * Ability to plan and conduct the study, and document the results * Technical writing skills * Leadership and organizational skills * Change management skills * Communication skills (oral and written) in order to better facilitate, interview and communicate in a collaborative manner * Ability to work independently or in a team environment. What is the career path for a Business Analyst? A Business Analyst in the IT field has many varied directions among which to choose a career path. The most direct would lead to a Lead Business Analyst position and then Project Manager whereby the incumbent manages projects through the entire lifecycle from inception to post-implementation including the management of business analysts' system analysts quality assurance analysts and most likely development project managers or team leads. That path would then lead to Program Management perhaps PMO management or Product Manager and on to Directorship. In addition a good Business Analyst may find they are heading toward a Customer Relationship Manager position whereby they become the primary IT interface to a given Business Unit (BU). This role most often leads to a position within the BU as a Manager of Applications or a Process Management role. Process Management opens many jobs including process re-engineering quality program development and large scale or enterprise process management programs such as ITIL or Six Sigma initiatives. These roles will continue to proliferate as companies realize the benefits of having a SME in process and quality. And still many Business Analysts find their understanding of business process entirely portable into purely

system related positions in the business side that are only peripherally related to IT. These of course may lead to quantitative roles manager roles or operational roles such as supply chain logistics et cetera.Of central importance to a successful Business Analyst is the interest in speaking to people. Face to face verbal communication is paramount to support other tools such as surveys and diagrams. Incumbents must be interested in understanding not only the pieces that comprise a system but the people that comprise it and the realities that embrace the system. Briefly the Business Analyst must understand and not judge the what should be and the what is. How would you transform business requirements to functional requirements? While preparing Business requirements documents you mention why you need to built a system, i.e. problem statement. What you need to do while creating functional requirements is you have to specify is, solution of the problem. Specify thoroughly business problem and explain solution for the same. Business requirement documents does not necessarily contains solution part, functional requirement may contain it how end user wants the system to perform. Don't forget to add non-functional requirements same doc. Following is the instance of Business Requirement, Functional Requirement and Non-Functional Requirement. Business Requirements :- sales order is made against customers purchase order. Sales order is given for approval to upper authority Functional requirement:- Sales order shall be made with reference from Purchase order and it should be approved from upper authority. Non-Functional Requirement:- Sales order should be in proper format (Specify format) and six copy of sales order should be printed from printer in 1 minute. How do you resolve issues? I would rather focus on issues and the facts related. Origin of issue, severity of the issue, implications and possible solutions to solve the issue. Try not to focus on the person who brought up the issue. Another important part is how to avoid similar issues in future. What analysis and modeling techniques do you use to translate business objectives into system requirements?
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Create project-initiation diagrams including business use cases, activity diagrams, workflow diagrams, flowcharts Determine project scope and derive context diagrams and project use cases from the business diagrams

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Detail the use cases by using activity diagrams or other techniques Create high level analysis dataflow diagrams, domain class diagrams, and entity-relationship diagrams from the use cases or other high level diagrams Recognize and understand the various design models, including the other relevant types of UML diagrams, detailed design entity-relationship diagrams, and decomposed dataflow diagrams Determine when to use which modeling technique, following them through a project life cycle, and understand which diagrams are derived from others

Understand the basic concepts of normalization and decomposition so can converse intelligently on the topic and review diagrams that have been normalized or decomposed Mention some of the tools commonly used by business analyst? There might be various tools that you as a business analyst would be using depending upon the work environment. The primary tools are:
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MS-Office (Especially Word) MS-Visio (for visualizing the concepts, creating diagrams)

But a lot of bigger organizations have been using Rational Software. Rational software licensing is expensive so you might not find it being used everywhere. Rational Requisite Pro (for Requirement Management) Rational ClearCase/ClearQuest (For change management) I have also found that some places like using MS-SharePoint, telelogic DOORS and other tools for document collaboration. I would say, keep a working knowledge of MS SharePoint, at least.Sometimes you might end up being a BA com QA. As such, it is nice to have a working knowledge of creating Test cases, using Load Runner, QTP etc.For more articles on BA and Interview Questions ans answers from BABOK , and Jobs for Business Analyst.Please visit http://www.crackinterviews.com/blog/groups/business-analyst-interviewquestions/forum/