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A business analyst (BA) has just completed a number of elicitation activities and is preparing to review the stated requirements. As part of this, the BA is checking the compliance of the stated requirements with organizational standards for business analysis.

What state is the BA attempting to move the requirements into?

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?

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 reviewing the performance results from a recent change initiative. One of the results stated, "The planned schedule expected 50% of the project to be done at milestone 6. The schedule performance index (SPI) was .87. Three project team members worked overtime to ensure that the actual schedule would align with the planned schedule."

This is an example of what type of action?