Assessment Summary

"The Industry Standard for Objective Business Analyst Skills Assessment™"

Are you looking for a way to prove your skills are excellent? Are you an employer that wants to make sure candidates are qualified to play the pivotal role of Business Analyst in your company?

This innovative offering from InQuestra Learning is designed for individual and corporate clients that want a Business Analyst Professional Skills Assessment & Testing Certificate to help prove skills, measure the effectiveness of training initiatives, or to make the hiring process more objective. This is a certified testing process with years of development behind it, has not only been aligned to the international standards body and professional certification of International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA™), but taken beyond this to look at a dozen areas of personal effectiveness skills and critical techniques for Business Analysts. The InQuestra Score given as part of the testing certificate is administered over the internet allowing participants to take the test whenever, and wherever required. InQuestra has implemented innovative technology to protect the integrity of the test, and ensure a valid audit of skills is produced.

Further, the InQuestra Score provides analysis of performance in 13 vital areas of Business Analysis Skill so that individuals or businesses have a more thorough understanding of personal strengths and weaknesses. This online assessment is intended for those:

1. Job Seekers – To attach a Skills Certificate to your resume

2. Professional Analysts – To help target career development needs.

3. Hiring Managers – To baseline skills.

4. Human Resource Managers – To assess training impact or improve the hiring process.

5. Recruitment Firms – To differentiate your candidate screening for clients.

From a pool of over 850 "cognitive domain" questions, InQuestra’s innovative testing software will randomly select 250 questions – weighting these to provide insightful feedback in 13 vital areas of Business Analyst Competency. "Cognitive domain" questions test skills that revolve around the six levels in Bloom's Taxonomy consisting of knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Additionally, by constantly changing the question bank, and managing the time allocated to participants for each question and area, InQuestra assures a valid certification of personal skills is produced. The Personal Skills Certificate issued provides an InQuestra Score in each of the following areas:

The Business Analyst Personal Skills Certificate and InQuestra Score is the most comprehensive testing available to Business Analysts today. A strong analyst will take about 2 hours to complete this test, while the software also strictly manages the total amount of time available to an individual. InQuestra’s focus with this test is to augment the development of professional standards such as the IIBA™ while improving the communication of specific skills for personal development, professional development, and organizational development initiatives. For more information about the technology behind the Business Analyst Personal Skills Certificate and Inquestra Score please see Skills Assessment Technology.

* IIBA is a registered trade mark of the International Institute of Business Analysis.

Delivery Options

Who Should Attend

Sample Screen Shot

Learning Objectives

• Tests Business Analysis competency
• Provides feedback on development areas.

Features

Reviews

View from a Hiring Manager : Pre-screen & Employee development. This is a great pre-employment screening tool, but I also use it to focus my training dollars with my current employees. I insist that my BA contractors take this assessment – I don’t want people that just interview well, I want people that perform well.
Reviewer: Rob Siemens, Germany

Professional Skills Assessment Report Content

The InQuestra Business Analyst Professional Skills Assessment provides an InQuestra Score on each of the following skill areas:

These foundations of business analyst knowledge include:

· Enterprise Analysis: Testing covers creating and maintaining the Business Architecture, conducting feasibility studies and optimum business solution selection, identifying opportunities for improvement, scoping opportunities, preparing business cases, conducting risk assessments, and preparing the decision package.

· Requirements Planning & Management: We examine selecting requirements techniques, coordinating inter-project work efforts, communicating planning decisions, monitoring plan changes, managing slippage, and capturing and reporting changes correctly and consistently.

· Requirements Elicitation: Testing examines defining standard techniques used to collect the requirements of the either a business system or automated system (or both) for either enhancement or new systems. Analysis professionals are tested on their ability to select the appropriate mean(s) to gather the needed requirements, the applicability of a technique’s process, the key features and each technique, and the strengths and weakness of each.

· Requirements Analysis & Documentation: Testing ensures candidates can identify gaps in the information and define the capabilities of the solution. Testing assures deliverables from this process can be used by the project team to develop estimates for the time, resources, and budget required to implement a solution or solutions that will fulfill the requirements. The domain goes beyond physical documentation for ensuring consensus is achieved while refining the models based upon stakeholder feedback and iteratively ensuring feasibility of the proposed requirements to support the business and user needs, goals and objectives.

· Requirements Communication: Testing in this includes ensuring analysts select and articulate requirements in a format appropriate for the intended audience using techniques for presenting, communicating, verifying, and gaining approval of the requirements from the stakeholders and implementers of the project. Analysts must consider when and where communications need to take place, what communication approach is appropriate for each situation, and how each communication should be presented. Requirements must be “packaged,” reviewed, and approved before the solution is implemented.

· Solution Assessment & Validation: Testing includes the tasks necessary to ensure that the solution meets the stakeholder objectives, is thoroughly tested, and the analyst’s understanding of the efforts required in assisting the technology team with detailed design work, reviewing technical design deliverables, and helping to build usability into the application software. In the case of a purchased solution, analysts must understand package customization decision-making and interface requirement building. Within the domain of testing Business Analyst’s re reviewed on their ability to support user acceptance testing and defect reporting and resolution.

Each of these five skills is essential for more advanced business analysis and team leadership.

· Leadership Skills: Conceptual testing of this category includes: problem mediation and resolution, support and coaching of subordinate and peers, consensus building, multi-tasking abilities, objective and priority setting, time management abilities and sensitivity toward others.

· Team Building/Relationships: Conceptual testing of this category includes: building and retaining effective skills to foster team dynamics, establish solid professional relationships, assessing and addressing problems in a team environment, support, coaching and development of other team members, consensus building, setting objectives and accepting ownership of team decisions, establishing and building trust.

· Negotiation Skills: Conceptual testing of this category includes: dealing with emotional behavior, multi-party mediation and conflict resolution, various types of negotiations in the working environment (superiors, peers, subordinates).

· Communication Skills: Conceptual testing of this category includes: verbal and written communications during the phases of the System Development Life Cycle, clarity and conciseness of various types of communications (e.g. formal, informal, business, technical, level of detail), verbal and non-verbal communications, effective communication of issues and solutions.

· Analytical & Systems Thinking: Conceptual testing of this category includes: logical thinking, systems organizations, inference and deductive reasoning, substitution, premise of arguments and conclusions, problem definition, establishment of facts, hypothesis formulation, solution definition and lateral thinking.

These two competency areas are essential for analysts of all skill levels to determine if they can be effective eliciting requirements as a facilitator or in developing effective documentation.

· Facilitation Skills: Testing covers skills that good Facilitators need during the Planning & Scoping Phase, Elicitation & Discovery Phase and the Review & Consensus Phase of requirements elicitation sessions. Concepts test for include; Questioning techniques, Listening techniques, Modeling techniques, Managing group dynamics, Getting the session back on track, Dealing with difficult people and Leading the session.

· Modeling Techniques: Conceptual testing of various modeling techniques including; Use Case; Usage Modeling, Process Modeling, Data Modeling, State-Transition, Scenarios, Data Flow Diagramming, Context Diagramming, Object-Oriented, User Stories, Prototyping, Work-Flow Diagramming, Domain Modeling, Class Modeling & Activity Modeling

* IIBA and CBAP are registered trade marks of the International Institute of Business Analysis

Reference Material Available