Thursday, May 12, 2011
Improving Your PMP® Exam Score
- Read the question, along with each answer, in one flow. You may be able to detect incorrect answers by detecting grammatical errors. This may be effective in “guessing” at the correct answer.
- Read all of the choices, even when you believe that the right answer is obvious.
- Don’t read anything into the question or an answer that isn’t stated.We all have a set of beliefs; yours may influence you to read something into the material that the author didn’t intend so try to avoid this.
- Try to anticipate the correct answer after reading the question and before reading any of the answers. This will help you to verify you’ve read the question and directions for answering correctly: if the answer you’ve anticipated does not appear in the choices, re-read both the question and directions carefully.
- Cover the answers as you read the question to eliminate the possibility of “cheating” by reading the answers before you can anticipate an answer.
- If the question contains a negative such as “none”, “not”, “never”, or“neither”, the correct answer must be a fact or an absolute; other answers may be correct statements but cannot be the correct answer.
- If the question contains a superlative such as “every”, “all”, “none”,“always”, or “only”, the correct answer must be an undisputed fact. Qualifiers such as “usually”, “often”, “generally”, “may”, or “seldom” might indicate a true statement.
- Try labeling the answers with a true or false label in the context of the question, then look for a pattern in the labels. Remember to consider any modifiers in the question when determining the correct answer. For example, if the modifier is always and there is only one “true” answer, it should be the correct answer. If the modifier is a word like “never” and only one answer has a false label, it should be the correct one.
- Look for key words in the question that appear in the answer. If only one answer contains the key words, this may be an indication it is the correct one.
- If 2 answers are very similar (called “partner” choices), this is usually an indication that one of them is the correct answer.
- If you’re having trouble choosing the “most correct” answer between 2 choices, compare each of them with the course terminology. The correct answer should be the one that most accurately mimics it.
- Study the sentence structure of the question. Identify the subject and verb and then identify the adjectives and adverbs. This approach helps you to determine whether you’re looking for an answer in the form of an absolute.
- Beware of double negatives. Phrases like “not never” should be translated into “sometimes”. If “not” appears in the question and “never” in the answer, this grammatical error may indicate a wrong answer.
- Beware of extraneous information not directly related to the question. Try re-phrasing the question without these “distractors”.
- Ask yourself if the answer you’ve selected requires an assumption. If the answer is yes, there is a very good chance this isn’t the correct choice.
- If the question appears to you to be a “trick” question, try reading the question and directions over again to eliminate any misunderstandings. Multiple choice exams do not use deception to encourage wrong answers.
- Be on the lookout for questions which answer other questions in the exam. This is mainly a memory exercise, but if a question you’re having difficulty answering, triggers the memory of a previous question, it may be worth your while to review the previous question and answer.
- Don’t shy away from changing your answer to a question if you identify a problem with the original answer.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Nice article from "Bridging the Gap"
Posted: Wed, 22 Sep 2010 11:00:34 +0000
- Project name
- Date started/date completed
- Techniques used
- Stakeholders worked with
- 3 things that worked well
- 3 things you’d do differently next time
- Biggest learning point
- Acronyms & terminology
- Other relevant information
- How do you invest your professional development time? A great question was delivered from an audience member on...
- What part does the IIBA play in your professional development?: Interview with Kym Byron, CBAP The best business analysts are open-minded. They let you help...
- Help a BA! How do I build a business analyst career development plan? Reader Question: I am a Senior IT consultant with many...
Monday, August 23, 2010
Why do we see technical skills in business analyst jobs?
Why do we see technical skills in business analyst jobs? We, as members of the business analysis profession, know that to be a business analyst, you don’t have to be an IT person. Doug Goldberg has covered this topic thoroughly and I don’t have anything to add to his angle.
But this doesn’t resolve what many experience in the job market. New and experienced business analysts alike will start researching jobs, only to discover that an overwhelming number of positions require specific technical skills. Or, they speak with a recruiter who has a myopic view of the role, and are told that if they can’t write code [or insert your favorite technical skill here], they’ll never make it as a BA.
Why we see BA jobs requiring technical skills
In the real-world job market, business analyst roles are messy. There are a specializations, unique qualifications, extensions, and partitions. “I want to be a business analyst” is not an adequately defined career goal. You’ve got to dig a bit deeper. This is a process I lead mentees in my current resume evaluation program through and also address in The Promotable Business Analyst. I’m also developing a comprehensive mini-course to help individuals prepare for a job search or a career change. (To receive notifications about this new course, be sure sign-up for the eNewsletter.)
The short answer is you can find a BA role that does not require technical skills. Prepare to wade through and ignore those jobs with technical qualifications. As soon as I find a job with an absolute requirement for SQL or a coding language, I stop reading and move on. If you don’t want to be doing those things, applying to jobs that require those skills is just a waste of time. So is fretting over their existence. Remind yourself that BA roles are messy and set them aside.
Sorting through the technical skills requirements
You may notice that not all jobs with specific technical skills listed require the ability to use those skills. Sometimes these skills are preferred. Sometimes they are not mapped to any of the job responsibilities in the description. Sometimes you can ascertain a bit about the position by looking for the context around the qualification. Consider the following two hypothetical examples:
- Write SQL reports. Requires SQL report writing experience with deep knowledge developing complex queries across multiple tables.
- Prior experience in SQL preferred. Understanding of database concepts and information models critical.
While the first requirement indicates day-to-day SQL responsibilities, the second does not. Vague or “preferred’ requirements often indicate a desire for a business analyst to think logically and understand big picture technical concepts. Other times, they have seen business analysts trampled by developers because they don’t ask the right questions. The assumption becomes if you can write code now or could write code in the past, you are less likely to be trampled by the developers.
When technical skills are couched in conceptual or communication-related contexts, the technical skill may be less important than system thinking competencies. And as a business analyst, IT-focused or not, you must have good systems-thinking skills. Read the comments in this discussion about the difference between a business analyst and a systems analyst for an insightful separation of systems knowledge from systems thinking.
Technical understanding vs. technical skills
While we are starting to see a growing number of jobs focusing specifically on business process and organizational changes, the reality is that most business analyst jobs involve working on IT projects. By an IT project, I mean that a larger part of the solution is implemented in software. To perform BA work on an IT project does not require the ability to write code. I’ve spent most of my career working on IT projects and I haven’t written a line of programming code since high school when I took a class on PASCAL.
As a business analyst on an IT project, it is important to have a general understanding of software systems. Basic knowledge of servers, databases, and client side technology, augmented with solid logical, systems-thinking will do. Combining both will lead to more effective communication with the implementation team.
Quick Test: Select a software application (client or web-based) that you use often. Select 2 or 3 activities you use it for. Can you identify the main sub-systems and interactions that are in place to enable these activities? If yes, you probably have enough software knowledge for a pure BA position on an IT project. If no, or if this test confused you, find an introductory book to read.
The final word.
My advice to you as a job seeker or career changer is to pick a direction for your business analyst career. Decide with some certainty if technical activities are part of your target position. If yes, then go about discovering the coveted technical skills and positioning yourself to build these qualifications. If no, then start ignoring the positions with these requirements. Focus on discovering the gems for which you are qualified and interested in.
What are your thoughts? Why do you think we see technical skills in business analysis positions?
Monday, June 14, 2010
8 Steps to Starting a Start-Up
As good as a list as I've seen from VentureHacks:
- Move to Silicon Valley. [BC: Not mandatory]
- Pick a great co-founder with complementary skills.
- Select people with intelligence, energy and integrity.
- Pick a big market.
- Develop the minimum viable product to test your hypothesis about what the market needs. Preferably it’s a product that you’re passionate about since you’ll need to stick with it to an irrational point (the Internet especially is efficiently arbitraged).
- Iterate like crazy until you find product/market fit. If you don’t find it, do not raise money, do not pass go. Start over.
- If you have found product/market fit, raise money from high-quality people that you trust. Keep control.
- Scale. Hang on.
The links within the list are good as well.
- Interview with Australian teen who had a party when his parents were out of town and refuses to apologize on TV.
- Clint Eastwood lists three reasons why he will never win an Oscar.
- Chris Yeh comment on my post on interestingness: "Things are interesting when they are both novel yet strangely familiar. It's like when you meet a new person, yet it seems like you've known them forever."
- Interesting photo project of strangers touching each other.
- Mexico's conflicting interests when it comes to the drug trade. Another masterful analysis from Stratfor."