Filling Business Analysis Experience in PMI-PBA® Application Form

PMI® has recently launched its new PMI Professional Business Analyst Certification course. Since, not much is divulged about the course apart from PMI-PBA® Content Outline and PMI-PBA ® Handbook, professionals worldwide have lots of questions to be answered on the subject.

One of the most important and persistent queries I have been receiving since the time of launch is how to fill business analysis experience in the PMI-PBA® certificate application form.

Filling the Business analysis experience in the PMI-PBA® certificate application form is a 5 step process.

1. Summary Level/Title level information- you are required to fill in the details like what is the name of the title or the project; what is the start date and end date
2. Details of the organization- you are required to furnish the contact details of the organization where you were working while you were involved in the said project.
3. Organization Contact- you are required to provide the contact details of an individual (can be your project manager) who can verify you were doing or primarily involved in the assignment. This person should be an approachable entity. This is because if your PMI-PBA® exam  application gets selected for audit, then your project manager or anyone whose contact details you have provided would have to sign your application before you send it to PMI for verification.
4. Hours per Domain- The previous three initial steps are primarily information only steps. Now, the fourth step is where you need to give breakup of your experience in hours terms in various domains. This is where you have to identify how many hours out of that particular assignment did you spend in individual domain.
5. Experience Summary- here is where you have to provide summary level description ranging from 300-550 characters explaining what you did during that assignment.

Step 4 and 5 are crucial for filling Business analysis experience in PMI-PBA® certification  Application form. Now in step 4 step you need to divide your business analysis experience into 5 domains. PMI has grouped business analysis activities into 5 groups and named them as domain area. The below task list will help you visualize what these 5 domain areas are all about, this list is to provide you an idea of the domain activities it is not an exhaustive list.

• Domain 1- Needs Assessment
  • Preparing a high level Scope Statement
  • Performing Cost Benefit Analysis
  • Identifying stakeholders and their needs
  • Preparing Business Case Document for Project
  • Developing Value Stream Map of the existing process
  • Conducting Customer Interviews and Surveys to assess the need
• Domain 2- Planning
  • Decomposition of high level scope into work packages
  • Identifying Business Analysis activities for work packages
  • Preparing Requirements Management Plan, describing how requirements will be analyzed, documented, and managed
  • Preparing Requirement Change Management plan by detailing the role and responsibilities of the stakeholders
  • Preparing a Configuration management Plan, also indentifying the system to support configuration management.
• Domain 3- Analysis
  • Eliciting requirements using various tools like Data Flow Diagram, Decision Table, Decision Tree, Dependency Graphs, Process Model and State Diagram
  • Preparing Requirement Specification Documents
  • Gathering and Documenting Acceptance Criteria
  • Using requirement prioritization tools like MoSCoW, Kano Model , Multi Voting
  • Obtaining sign-off on requirement document
  • Validating Requirements
  • Presenting the solution to the stakeholders and develop Consensus for the product scope.
• Domain 4- Traceability and Monitoring
  • Maintaining requirement traceability matrix based on progress made in development and testing
  • Preparing Project Performance Report providing details of completed scope, deviations and future forecast
  • Sharing Project Performance with stakeholders
  • Managing Changes to the requirement by following the change management plan and keep a log of all changes in the change log
  • Interacting with stakeholders and managing conflicts and maintaining issue log
• 5.Domain 5- Evaluation
  • Validating solution test results
  • Perform Acceptance testing
  • Doing a gap analysis for the developed solution
  • Providing feedback on requirement gaps
  • Delivering an end user training
  • Securing final sign-off from end customers
  • Doing valuation analysis
  • Evaluating adherence to Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Here is the high level overview of all these five domains:

Now, you have these five domains you need to visualize what day to day activities you performed during given project and then you have to distribute hours under these 5 domains. Many test takers gets confused how to distribute hours under these domains. In a given year you can take hours somewhere in between 1500-2000 which approximates around allocating 170-180 hours per month for the given project.

Here, the most intriguing question of all comes, how we distribute the hours to each domain (Step 4). Is PMI expecting some sort of specific percentage of hours per domain? PMI expects you to allot certain hours in each domain. For instance, in planning, traceability and monitoring, evaluation domain you may spend 10-20% of your time while the analysis domain may take 30-40% of your hours. I would recommend you to list all the activities per domain and then see which domain activities are dominant and then contribute hours according to the relevance.

Filling project case- now if you are a certified PMP® certified then PMI already recognizes you are already doing Project related activities. If you are doing PMI-PBA® certificate and are not a PMP® certified already then you need to demonstrate you have 2000 hours of experience working with the project teams.

The PMI-PBA® certificate is designed for the business analysts who are doing business analysis in a project environment. The PMI is looking for the integration of project management activities with business analysis activities. They expect a professional should have nearby 2000 hours of experience in working on a project. Here also you need to give your experience in the five steps, giving the title of the project, details of the organization, and contact details of the person. In the fourth step, however, unlike business analysis experience you need to give just one number for the hours of experience. Then you are required to give summary explaining you were involved in a project related business analysis or other activities in between 300-550 characters.

I hope this blog has sufficiently answered your all queries related to how to fill in business analysis work experience details in the PMI-PBA® exam Application form. Good Luck with your PMI-PBA® Certification Exam.

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