Your Guide to being a CBAP?

I wanted to share my experience in preparing to write my CBAP? (Certified Business Analysis Professional) exam from IIBA?. Introductory first time I heard about CBAP and been interested in it was in 2018, which then I was theoretically eligible for the exam, but I don’t even know how it could be achieved, through all these years till I have been CBAP? there were many trials to start reading and studying the BABOK then start losing passion and motivation to continue, but on every time I start over again, I understand more and more from the content of the BABOK, which is the core action needed to pass the CBAP, which is mainly depending on reading the BABOK and practicing several times, till you feel confident of your knowledge collected from the BABOK.

And here is an overview of my exam experience that may guide you in preparing for this exam. It was a long post, however, I tried to sort down all the details related, that I wish I had found when I was looking into how best to prepare myself mentally for the CBAP.

General?Preparation?Advice

Acknowledged that I have been CBAP from my first trial, but I need to state that the BABOK knowledge, and information fade away too fast, no matter how much you are experienced or even applying it in your day-to-day tasks, therefore it’s a guide, that you will refer it every while to understand how to perform your business analysis tasks related. So, here is what to be considered while preparing for CBAP you need to know and learn a lot about:

1. The Knowledge Areas?and ensure that your whole thinking around business analysis tasks described in the?BABOK.
2. The elements within each task to know what should be done when in which task.
3. The inputs, outputs and guidelines & tools of each?task and try to relate the similar inputs for each task and understand the purpose of using this item as an input, and also relate the output of each task and when this task output would be used as an input for another task, that will lead you to answer these types of questions easily like “what should the business analyst do next?” and “what information is the business analyst missing?” noting that recalling the task and the flow of information is easier when you understand it, more than memorization of this information
4. The mind mapping of knowledge areas, tasks, and its inputs, outputs, guidelines, tools, and elements, will help you a lot to recall the information once needed, however, the CBAP exam is not a type of memorization exam, you need to memorize the pillars of the BABOK which are the tasks of each knowledge areas.
5. You will need an excellent knowledge of ALL Stakeholders groups and their roles in each task, you need to know who is accountable, responsible, consulted, and the description of each stakeholders' groups, here the keywords would be helpful a lot, for example, the regulator you will find the words like rules and regulations
6. You will need an excellent knowledge of ALL techniques listed in?the?BABOK what they are used for and when they are appropriate. And you could group similar/related techniques that could ease your understanding of the techniques, for example, you can group techniques related to Stakeholders, like (Roles and Permissions Matrix, Stakeholder List, Map, or Personas, vendor Assessment) and so on with the 50 techniques listed in the BABOK
7. You should have a good knowledge of the competencies and perspectives and understand how they might be employed/change our business analysis approach,?respectively.
8. The core concepts of?the?BABOK and how they apply to each knowledge area

In summary, you should be able to get to a point where you can list all BABOK Knowledge Areas and tasks from memory, give a brief explanation as to what each one does and have an innovative idea of their inputs/outputs, and can identify the guidelines and tools, stakeholders, and techniques used within each task, it may look hard to identify those aspects, but practicing on questions will make you understand them increasingly each time, that will make it easy to recognize.

My Preparation

In terms of my preparation, I read the BABOK? in its entirety more than 5 times regardless of the study group of the BABOK

I would say that training is appropriate if you're beginning from nothing and want an instructor-led guided tour into the material, but it's no substitute for going over the book repeatedly and making your notes – you should pull out any definitions and pay particular attention to bullet point lists that give you classifications such as:

• The definition of a SMART requirement.?
• Candidates for modeling attributes of a requirement.
• Diverse types of scope.?
• Different approaches to risk.?

CBAP Exam Simulator

You will need to use a simulated test that will be your partner beside the BABOK through the journey to the CBAP

I have tried Tech Canvas and Watermark, and here are the good points regarding each of them:

1. Tech Canvas will provide you with Mind maps of the 6 knowledge areas, techniques, and perspectives, which I found extremely useful,
2. Tech Canvas provides you with 800+ Q Banks, against +1200 Q Bank for watermark
3. The questions of both were good for me considering the scenarios and use cases questions, but watermark was better for me due to the more questions in the q Bank
4. Both have tailored questions for knowledge areas, and simulations for the CBAP
5. The questions were good but there did seem to be about 15% of them which were just too specific and relied on memory work! Questions such as "which of these is not a recommended technique for Assessing Risks?" or "What forms the culture of an organization?" where the simulator was looking for you to know the exact phrase, bullet point, or list from the BABOK.?
6. Also, I have tried Institute i4 trial, and I have found their questions are good too, and it offers subscriptions for 1500+ Q Banks

This last point is the?important?one. It was pretty infuriating getting questions that you could only possibly answer if you had memorized the whole guide like some sacred text and I’m happy to say that there were very few of these sorts of questions on the actual exam.?

Even though the simulations I have used included these?obscure and fussy?questions, and they cost me points in my practice tests, they did force me to go and look up each wrong answer?in the guide?and continue learning in this?way,?which lead me to read between the lines and understand the context of the BABOK more, as you first read it you could find some of the text could be eliminated and passed, and still, you can get the main idea, however, these paragraphs, contain information that you need to understand well.

Before I took the actual CBAP exam, I was only scoring between 60 and 70% on the Watermark practice tests – this worried me and made me feel less than ready but hey, because of the practice testing, there were even parts of the actual exam that felt easier than the simulators.

So, in conclusion, the practice test was worth the money in that it focused my study and guided me where I needed to polish my knowledge, but the questions felt harder and more pure memory-based than the actual exam. If you can survive the simulator and get around 65 - 70% then you are ready. But take into consideration to use the simulators once you have set a study plan and you are already eligible for the exam and willing for it, to make the full benefit from it.

The Exam?

So, the format of the exam is described on the IIBA website. 120 multiple-choice questions for which only one answer is correct. There were no questions with multiple answers. Questions come from across the whole?BABOK and are distributed as per the published CBAP Exam Weight.?

My feeling leaving the exam was:?

• 20% to 30% scenario questions with about 1 to 1.5 pages to read and digest.?These were the more challenging ones and required some careful thought as to what?Knowledge?Area(s) we were in, what stakeholder attitudes were indicated, what the BA might have missed etc.?
• 10% straight-forward questions where the right answer was obvious based on the first reading of BABOK?or your background BA knowledge.?
• 20% of questions where I needed to work on a process of elimination of answers because no one right answer stood out.?
• 10% that needed a good understanding of the techniques and their appropriateness to a particular BA problem/modeling scenario.
• 5% of questions required some number crunching calculation – so know any formulae mentioned in?BABOK
• The rest of the questions were all somewhere in the middle of the difficulty spectrum, they required some thinking, some reflecting on the?Knowledge?Area involved, relevant tools,?guidelines,?and techniques.
• there was an on-screen calculator?(as well as pencil and paper)?to?help the numerically challenged.?
• You?also?could?flag questions for ease of returning to them.

The exam questions would take the full 3.5 hours if you are lucky, you could get back to a bunch of flagged questions to recheck on them again, indeed reading a question more than once will make you increase your percentage of understanding of it, but you need to consider the time, so you are not consuming more time one a single question more than others

And one thing which is different from the simulator is that the actual exam was sequencing the scenario and use cases questions all at first, which is not the case at simulators, that stressed me at first, so you need to be prepared to whatever the sequence of the exam question and to focus on what question you currently answers.

Make sure to read the FAQ related to the exam day on the IIBA site, and what you are expected to register, do the system check, and access the exam. This is important to consider so you can access the exam easily

In?Conclusion?

I can only echo the advice I found elsewhere. You must be extremely comfortable with the BABOK, know your way around the Knowledge Areas, their tasks and elements, input, and outputs in detail, and understand every technique and its purpose. You should be able to recognize tools and guidelines from BABOK and know where (in what task) they will be useful.

Beyond this, a knowledge of the competencies, perspectives, and core principles is foundational for the knowledge mentioned above.

Make a study plan that fits your work life, and it's recommended to contain the reasonable time for Reading the BABOK (30%) and practicing on it (60%) and the remaining is for memorization mind mapping, summarizing, etc.

The reasonable time that you would consider for preparing yourself for the CBAP depends on you, and the time of studying that you allocate for it, once you feel confident with your knowledge you can decide when to register for the exam, initially, you may start with a 2 – 3 study plan and decide whether you are ready for the exam.