Business Analysis Homebase

STAR and CAR

From experience working in Government, we use the STAR or CAR method when interviewing prospective Business Analysts:

1. Situation: Where you worked and in what position (e.g. I worked for a gov department as a Business Analyst),
2. Task: The mission/job you were asked/required to do (e.g. I had to write up the CRM Requirements for our area),
   1. Sometimes Situation and Task are rolled up into “Context” hence CAR. I like to spell it out to make it obvious..
3. Action: The work you did to accomplish the task (e.g. I interviewed each party individually, documented requirements, sent back to collect feedback, etc),
4. Results: The outcomes/benefits of your hard work! (The project landed $400,000,000 in funding)

Pretty simple right? Think about your experience as a BA (or other relevant profession), select a relevant example to the question, break down your example into these 4 steps/stages, and boom done! You’ve made a STAR answer applied to question at hand.

These style of interview question are often made up of multiple parts or sub-questions, so either note them down on paper during the interview, get them to post the question in chat (if online interview), or ask them to repeat the question if you feel you’ve missed a specific part. You can always end your answer seeking clarification with “Have I missed any part of the question” or “Is there any detail I have missed?”

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Interview questions to practice with

As a reminder, these are just some sample potential questions, we can’t predict the questions you might be asked, but hopefully these give you some guidance.

The generic starting questions…

• Can you tell us what attracted you to this role?

STAR/CAR format questions:

• We may be running many medium sized projects concurrently. How do you create the right conditions for project delivery?
• Many of our projects will require a variety of discovery workshops to gather requirements. Have you run Inception workshops before and how do you ensure you get the results you need from a workshop?
• We have a range of stakeholders to engage with, from technical roles such as architects and developers, to executives who approve project funding. Can you provide an example of a projects you’ve managed with a range of stakeholders, explain what type of stakeholders and how you maintain their support?
• There is a need in this team to be able to understand data integration issues, capture technical problems and help guide stakeholders to design and document API based solutions. What experience do you have in making technical integration solutions and were APIs involved?
• Can you tell me about a time you had to deliver bad news to a client and how did you manage this?
• Tell us about a time when you have participated in a requirements gathering process for a new product? Describe the design and documentation process you followed.
• Tell us about a time when information security has played a major part in the delivery of a tech project. What did you do to prevent things going wrong?
• Tell us about the most complex piece of process design you have helped deliver. What were the big challenges in putting it together?
• Tell us about a time when you have worked on a solution for something that built on existing tech? How did you know what to keep and what needed improvement?
• Tell us about a development projects you have worked on that used Agile processes. Are you a fan of working with Agile methodology? What do you think are its key benefits or shortfalls?
• Can you walk us through your process of developing KPIs for reporting on strategic objectives?
• Can you tell us about your typical approach to requirements in an agile project? How does your Salesforce experience make you more effective in your BA role?
• Can you describe a situation when you wouldn’t have been able to finish a project or meet an important objective without first gaining the commitment of several different stakeholder groups? Why was their buy-in so important? Were you able to win each group over and how did you achieve this?
• Think about a time when you collaborated to achieve a goal or overcome a business challenge. Why was it important to work as a team? What role did you play in making the collaboration a success?
• Describe a time when you worked with end-users to improve processes or systems in an iterative manner. What were the drivers for the improvements? How did you ensure each iteration delivered a quality result? How were the benefits of continuous improvement realised?
• Describe a time when you had to solve a business problem or make a decision but there was ambiguity, or you didn’t have all the necessary information. What steps did you take to resolve the problem/make the decision?
• Tell us about a time where you used business analysis experience, with knowledge and experience of data modelling and data management systems implementation, to translate data requirements into actionable recommendations.
• When have you demonstrated strong understanding of the principles of information technology including SQL Databases, Software Development Life Cycle, Agile processes, Web applications and web services?
• Give an example of dealing with difficult high-level stakeholders.
• Provide us an example of when you utilised best practice design and definition of data integration processes to build an API.
• When have you demonstrated experience working in an agile environment (SCRUM) including the creation of user stories, prototypes/wireframes?
• Tell us something about your background, your qualifications, skills and abilities?
• How did you know if your customers were satisfied? Give me a specific example.
• How have you built strong relationships with stakeholders to understand and define business problems and opportunities, providing expert advice on the application of new technologies and solution design to maximise business benefits and efficiencies?
• Tell me about a situation in which you had to adjust quickly to a change in organisational, departmental, or team priorities?

Technical questions:

Whilst not all roles require a technical element, some may request for you to elaborate on your technical knowledge with examples, explanations or code-writing

• Write us psudo-code demonstrating how you would:
  • use SQL to join 2 tables, so we could get the product details and their history of prices
  • use a language of your choice to automate API calls and save the outputs to text
  • use any language to print the numbers from 1 to 200 in new line, but for every multiple of 5 print “Foo”, for every multiple of 7 print “Bar” and for every multiple of both 5 and 7 print “FooBar” instead of the number.

This is probably a good start if you’re looking for questions to interview on, or be interviewed for. Best of luck with your interviews and hope these have helped!

Stefan Carton

Updated: 18/08/2022