Azerbaijan State Oil and Industry University

Program BBA Final/Midterm : Midterm

(MBA/ BBA/ ZU) :
Course name : Business Analysis Instructor’s name : Agil Valiyev

Student’s name : Group number BBA 038

(BBA /ZU) :
Term (fall, spring): fall Date of exam : 07.12.2020

Theoretical part

1. Understanding of origin of business analysis, its purpose and methods in your examples
2. Explain the ways of the development of business analysis in your examples
3. Describe business change lifecycle and explain each items in your examples
4. Business change lifecycle: explain the importance of the business analyst and the use of
consultants
5. Explain potential range of the business analyst role in your examples
6. Describe Business Models Purpose and explain 5 kinds of business models in your examples
7. Business models: explain 2 other key “Threads”
8. Explain each types of business models by using your personal approaches
9. What is Business Object (Data) Model, its purpose and considerations?
10. Business Object (Data) Model: Direct Cross-reference to Other Models in your examples
11. Business Process Model, its purpose: explain time-series analysis and forecasting methods
12. Business Process Model: quantitative and qualitative method
13. Competencies of business analyst: explain behavioral skills and personal qualities steps in your
examples
14. Competencies of business analyst: explain business knowledge steps and give your examples
15. Competencies of business analyst: explain steps of techniques in your examples
16. How can you develop your competencies as business analyst?
17. What does a strategy and strategy plan include and give your examples?
18. Explain levels of strategy in your examples
19. Successful strategy: from environmental analysis to industry analysis
20. Describe types of gaining and sustaining competitive advantage: explain external environment
analysis
21. Explain Porter’s Five Forces of Competition Framework in your examples
22. Understanding internal environment analysis in your examples
23. Explain SWOT analysis, aims of it and give your examples
24. How to conduct SWOT Analysis?
25. Benefits, pitfalls, brainstorming & prioritization in SWOT analysis
26. Understanding of the Balanced Scorecard and its Links Performance Measures
27. Why are companies adopting a balanced scorecard?
28. What Is a Critical Success Factor? Explain in your business idea scope
29. KPI and explain its characteristics in your examples
30. Explain types of KPI and give your examples for each types
31. The Business Analysis Process Model: explain a problem-solving model
 32. The Business Analysis Process Model: explain process model in your example
33. Investigation techniques for business analysis: explain workshop and Fishbone diagrams
techniques in your example
34. Investigation techniques for business analysis: STOP model and scenario techniques in your
examples
35. Understanding of forecasting: explain its principles and steps
36. Forecasting Approaches: explain qualitative and quantitative methods
37. Quantitative Methods: explain Time Series Models and Causal Models or Associative Models
38. Explain Times Series components in your examples
39. Times Series forecasting: explain moving average method in your example
40. Times Series forecasting: explain Exponential Smoothing Method in your examples
41. Understanding of Stakeholder analysis and importance of it
42. Explain Stakeholder management in the project lifecycle and give your example
43. Describe each types of Stakeholder “essentials” in your examples
44. Modelling business systems: explain Checkland’s soft systems methodology for your suggested
business
45. CATWOE and its elements in your examples
46. Business Activity Models (BAM) and explain each types of it
47. Business Activity Models (BAM): explain producing a consensus model in your example
48. Understanding of Business events, business rules and types of them in your suggested examples
49. Analyzing the business process model in your examples
50. The business process model: explain SIX SIGMA method and give your example

Practical part

1. Imagine, you are working on a time series dataset. Your manager has asked you to build a highly
accurate model. You started to build two types of models which are given below.
Model 1: Decision Tree model
Model 2: Time series regression model
At the end of evaluation of these two models, you found that model 2 is better than model 1. What
could be the possible reason for your inference?
2. Explain following topic within The McKinsey 7S Framework and PESTEL strategic analysis
framework:
“American Business Sector: Possible solutions to the decline of trust”
3. You, the product manager, are about to launch a new revamped CRM. Here are all your
stakeholders:
 The marketing department is the main user of the platform.
 The customer success team occasionally needs to use the CRM platform to send out urgent
messages to users.
 The analytics team is responsible to build dashboards from the CRM data.
 The engineering team is responsible for the development of the platform.
Design RACI and RASCI stakeholders’ management analysis for this study.
4. Epsilan Court Co. has recorded the following numbers of customer complaints each month:

Continuously changing conditions mean that any data over three months old is no longer reliable.
Use a moving average to forecast the number of complaints for the future.

5. Use exponential smoothing with α = 0.2 and an initial value of F1 = 170 to get forecasts one
period ahead for the following time series.

6. Case study: Workload planning

Maria Castigliani is head of the purchasing department of Ambrosiana Merceti, a medium-sized
construction company. One morning she walked into the office and said, ‘The main problem in this
office is lack of planning. I have read a few articles about planning, and it seems that forecasting is
the key to an efficient business. We have never done any forecasting, but simply rely on
experience
to guess our future workload. I think we should start using exponential smoothing to do some
forecasting. Then we can foresee problems and schedule our time more efficiently.’ Unfortunately,
the purchasing department was having a busy time and nobody in the office had time to develop
Maria’s ideas. A month later nothing had happened. Maria was not pleased and said that their
current high workload was caused by lack of planning – and hence forecasting – and things would
be much better if they organized their time more effectively. In particular, they could level their
workload and would not be overwhelmed by periodic surges.
To make some progress with the forecasting, Maria seconded Piotr Zemlinski, a management
trainee, to work on some figures. Piotr examined their work, and divided it into seven categories,
including searching for business, preparing estimates, submitting tenders, finding suppliers, and so
on. For each of these categories he added the number of distinct tasks the office had completed in
each quarter of the past three years. Collecting the data took six weeks, and Piotr summarized it in
the following table.
Now Piotr wants to forecast likely workload for the next two years. He knows a little about forecasting,
and feels that exponential smoothing may not be the answer. He is not sure that the data is accurate
enough, or that the results will be reliable. He feels that it would be better to link the forecasts directly to
planning, overall workload, and capacity. To help with this, he has converted the effort involved with
different tasks
into ‘standard work units’. After some discussion he allocated the following number of work units to a
typical task in each category of work.
Category 1 2 work units
Category 2 1.5 work units
Category 3 1 work unit
Category 4 0.7 work units
Category 5 0.4 work units
Category 6 3 work units
Category 7 2.5 work units
Questions
- What information has Piotr collected, and how useful is it? What other information does he need?
- How can Piotr forecast future workloads in the purchasing department? How reliable are the results?
Do they suggest any patterns of workload?
- What are the implications of Piotr’s work, and what should he do now?

7. Case study: Energy consumption around the world is rising. Find some figures to describe this growth.
Now forecast the future demand for electricity. How accurate are your results? What other factors
should be taken into account? What are the implications of your findings?
8. Case study: Lundquist Transport
Lundquist Transport provides a specialist service, designing logistics systems for companies around
Scandinavia. It also runs a fleet of longdistance trucks from its headquarters outside Copenhagen. The
company wants to expand this fleet and take advantage of the growing trade between Scandinavia and
central and Eastern Europe, where the amounts of goods moving to Poland, Hungary, the Czech
Republic and beyond are increasing rapidly.
Lundquist recently examined their revenues and costs. Costs do not rise linearly with demand, as the
company can get substantial economies of scale and can adjust operations to meet demand in different
ways. Revenues are also not linear, as they give discounts for larger orders and longer distances. The
actual figures are confidential, but to allow comparisons and discussion Lundquist illustrate them in
terms of ‘standard’ values shown in the following table.
The current volume of business is described as ‘1.0’ and the operations managers think that this is putting
too much pressure on them. In the long term, any expansion by Lundquist will need major changes in the
way that they work – particularly buying new facilities and employing more people. In the short term, it
may be better to keep the same operations and make adjustments to the volume of business. It is fairly
easy to do this in such a competitive market, simply by changing the price structure. Lundquist have done
no detailed calculations on this, but the commonly accepted rule is that a 5% increase in price reduces
demand
by 10%.
Both of these options – long-term expansion and short-term adjustment – involve some risk. The
expansion relies on forecasts of long-term trends in an area of continuing economic uncertainty. Short-
term adjustments might harm their reputation and encourage competitors to develop new operations.
Question
- What would you advise the senior managers of Lundquist to do? Prepare a report which describes the
current situation, analyses available information, discusses alternative policies, and recommends a best
option.

9. Calculus is one of the most difficult quantitative tools for managers to understand. Not surprisingly,
this affects the amount it is used, even for areas like financial planning. Find some real examples
where managers have used calculus. What benefits and problems have they found? In what other areas
could it be used if managers understood it better?
10. Case study: Kings Fruit Farm
In the 1920s Edward Filbert became the tenant of Kings Farm in Cambridgeshire. In 1978 his
grandson James Filbert became the latest manager. But in the intervening years the farm has changed
considerably. It has grown from 195 acres to over 3,000 acres and is owned by an agricultural
company that owns several other farms in the area. Kings Farm grows a variety of vegetables, cereals
and fruit, with Kings Fruit Farm as a subsidiary that focuses on their apple, pear, plum, damson and
cherry orchards.
Recently James has been looking at the sales of plums. These are graded and sold as fruit to local
shops and markets, for canning to a local cannery, or for jam to a more distant processor. The plums
sold for canning earn about half as much income as those sold for fruit, but twice as much as those
sold for jam.
James is trying to estimate the weight of plums sold each year. He does not know this, as the plums are
sold by the basket rather than by weight, with each basket holding about 25 kg of plums. For a pilot
study, James set up some scales to see whether he could weigh the amount of fruit in a sample of
baskets. On the first day he weighed 10 baskets, six of which were sold as fruit, three for canning and
one for jam. The weights of fruit, in kilograms, were as follows:
25.6 20.8 29.4 28.0 22.2 23.1 25.3 26.5 20.7 21.9
This trial seemed to work, so James then weighed a sample of 50 baskets on three consecutive days.
The weights of fruit, in kg, were as follows:
He also recorded the number of each sample sent to each destination:

Pickers are paid by the basket, and the payments book showed the number of baskets picked on the three
days as 820, 750 and 700 respectively. During a good harvest, a total of around 6,000 baskets are picked.
Questions
 What information can James find from these figures? How can he use this information?
 How should he set about a complete survey of the fruit crop?

11. You have given to sell following products for 15 days’ period: rice, orange, sweat, coffee. Explain
forecasting time series for this products by using SPSS (time period: 3 minutes)