Based on my friend Guru's and my experience and understanding of the BVPS Exam, I have put down some info regarding the kind of questions and the approach what I thought helped us crack the exam. Hope this helps!!
BVPS – Business Value Planning Services
The certification exam consists of 5 case studies in all to be solved in 210 minutes with a maximum of 42 minutes on each case study. The case studies are about an arbitrary company which wants to improve one/many of it’s business processes. Each case study has 10 questions in it making it 50 in totality. Each case study contains the following sections as part of the comprehension :
• Overview of the company : This section gives a general overview about what the organization is into and what it’s turnover etc is. This will help you answer questions related to calculations on how soon ROI can be achieved. These questions are fairly simple since they just involve minor calculations.
• Flow of the business : This section contains information about what processes the company would like to revisit or optimize. It gives you the entire workflow involved in the identified process. It will help you answer questions involving calculations like how much time can be saved by implementing the proposed solution. A typical question related to this section would look like “Which two processes in the given exhibit(a flow diagram included in the question) would you most likely automate as part of you proposed solution”. Based on which process takes the most amount of time or which workflow can help reduce costs (based on Labour Cost per hour which will be provided in the case study) you would be able to identify the right processes.
• Business Pain Areas : This section contains bulleted points of the key pain areas for the company. This would help in answering questions like what business problem in the company needs to be addressed on highest priority. A typical question related to this section could be like “You need to come up with a value-proposition to A.Datum(arbitrary company) to improve their revenue and improve cost-optimization. Which of these would you choose.” .Reading the Busines pain areas should give you a fair idea as to what business problem is of highest importance to the organization.
• Business Goals : This section again contains bulleted points of the key business goals the customer is looking at over the next year or so. It could have points like “Increase revenue by 10%, or cut costs by 8%, or reduce attrition by x% and so on.” Focussing on this section would help you answer questions like “What business proposition would be include during your BVPS Engagement with the customer when giving a presentation to the management and the VP”.
• Interviewees : This section contains various roles in the company like CFO, CEO, HR Director, Sales Executive (relevant to the case study), and explains what information you could extract by interviewing the particular person. This needs to be focused to answer question where you are required to identify the person in an organization if you were to understand requirements. A typical question could be like “You are planning to implement a SharePoint based solution to improve the Certification Management System at Contoso(an arbitrary organization). Who would you likely speak to?” And it would have options like CEO, Site manager et al. The Interviewees section would give you a fair idea as to who the right person would be based on what his role in the organization is and what falls under his objectives.
General Approach for the Exam
Around 3-4 of the case studies of the exam have customers who have an EA with Microsoft. So the basic approach should be to leverage most of SharePoint and Office 2007 technologies though there will be questions which might seem confusing to orient you towards proposing a solution without employing Office 2007.
There will be a couple of questions on what you would deliver as part of your BVPS Engagement to the customer, given the Engagement Type(3-day, 5-day, 10-day, 15-day). The BVPS Resource kit contains information on the same. Largely, only a 3-day engagement does not contain a cost benefit analysis as part of the engagement. Rest all engagement types are the same varying only on the number of processes in the organization that you would identify to optimize( something like 2 processes for a 10-day engagement and 3 for a 15-day engagement).
The best way to answer questions where confusion prevails, is by thinking on the lines of what benefits Microsoft most.
Time would never be an issue for any of the case study as much as the slight confusion. So there will never be a need to rush through the case study fearing shortage of time. On an average you would end up finishing each case study with easily 10-15 mins to spare. To sum it all up, it was really a challenging at the same time a very exciting experience.
To add to the excitement we were more than ecstatic when we realized that Guruprasad(my friend) and me were the first in India to have cracked the BVPS Exam Dinesh Goteti.
dineshgoteti@gmail.com
