A team of business analysts (BAs) were assigned to review an enhancement request that would involve changes in a stockroom and the inventory of products. The changes will impact several groups of people and the amount of savings is in excess of $1 million dollars. The recommended process improvement will be presented to management for approval.
What should the team do first?
A very large insurer of General Liability and Property Damage insurance has an upward trend of increased claims over the past 5 years.
The Risk Control Area for that company has just completed a 12 month Pilot of a new improved Risk Control Site.
The purpose of the site is to help their customers manage their exposures and ideally prevent them from having claims There were 100 customers that were part of the Pilot that represented 25 different industries. The business goals were to increase use of the site and provide tools to help customer awareness of their exposures, so that they may reduce existing exposures and ultimately reduce claims.
The sites Features were as follows:
* Improvements to the search engine to all customers to search for articles, tools and services on the site
* A checklist function that allow customer to create their own unique Checklists or utilize a sample provided by ABC company to use daily, weekly etc. for an area of their facility.
* A promotion feature - where Risk preventing Articles, and tools on the site are marketed toward a customer.
* A profile section allowing for Customer Name, Address and contact Phone number.
Alter the 12 month pilot the business sponsor received an assessment of what was working and what was not. The Assessment of the pilot revealed overall site activity had significantly increased, however only 5% of the time the promotions were viewed. And the most shocking was that total claims increased by nearly 20% for these 100 customers during the pilot period. The business sponsor was perplexed as he had an expectation of reduced claims and at least for 30% viewing of promotions since the project team had spent a lot of careful time and effort on this feature. A BA was assigned to do further analysis regarding the low use of the promotions and why claims were not being reduced.
Regarding the use of promotions the BA looked into other similar companies to see what they did differently to get their customer to look at their promotions. The BA found that similar companies had promotions that targeted the industry the customer was in so it was more relevant to them and they were more interested to view the promotion. In addition the BA sent out a survey to all 100 pilot customers asking probing questions about what they thought of the site and if they felt it had decreased their exposure to risk sufficiently. The Survey responses came back with raving positive comments and providing examples of how the site had been helping in the reduction of claims from the customer's perspective. In addition the survey also revealed insight that the customers found the promotion often irrelevant to their industry.
The BA asked for a dump of all documentation of the 1000 claims that were filed over the 12 month pilot period. The BA found the nearly 90% of the claim filed were all in one region of the country and were all for property damage related to several severe winter storms in the region and the claims were nearly all unavoidable by the customers. The BA brought all this analysis back to the business sponsor and made the recommendation to the business sponsor to require the customer to select 1 of 25 industries in their profile. This would in turn allow for the ability to show industry specific promotions and promote search results relative to a customer's industry to be sorted at the top giving the customer a more personalized experience.
What technique was the BA using to understand why the promotions were not being viewed?
After the new report "Customer Sales by Date" was deployed last week, the sales team is now unable to generate the previously existing report "Consolidated Sales by Customer, " which is causing customer dissatisfaction.
What could the business analyst (BA) have assessed to prevent this situation?
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?
TESTED 19 May 2024
