A major manufacturer of popular beverages has appointed a local distributor to serve a specific territory. The demand for the beverages has a pronounced seasonal pattern. The distributor performs well overall, but is repeatedly unable to keep up with fulfilling many customer orders during peak demand periods. The distributor's current delivery capability is stretched to deliver 60 tons of merchandise per day whereas the season's peak demand periods need a daily delivery capability of up to 100 tons.
The distributor is under pressure to fully meet the year-round market demand in order to stay in business. The distributor's management wants to identify and consider more cost-effective options as resorting to adding more trucks and drivers would not be economically feasible.
A business analyst (BA) has spent several days observing and measuring the warehouse activities to understand the situation and to gain insights into possible solutions. The delivery workflow is a four-step process: (1) picking the orders and assembling them on trays, (2) bringing the trays to the loading bay, (3) loading the orders into trucks, and (4) delivering the orders to customers. As the following table illustrates, overall performance depends is dependent on five major resources: (1) the workers who pick the orders and load them into trucks, (2) the tallyers who check the orders, (3) the drivers, (4) the trucks, and (5) eight loading bays (LBs).

Each truck can only make two trips a day. The BA has noticed that only 30% of trips have their orders available for loading when a truck arrives. Otherwise the truck has to wait one extra hour until the orders are picked and brought to the loading bay.
If trucks are the only constraint, approximately how many hours are lost due to this downtime?

A company with a big information technology (IT) department has hired a lead business analyst (BA) to enhance its business analysis practices. The lead BA discovers that sponsors are not satisfied with project outcomes. Developers complain about incomplete, ambiguous, and changing requirements. All stakeholders, including project managers, are blaming long cycles of analysis for the delays. The business analysts, in turn, feel overwhelmed with the number of projects and frustrated by the lack of collaboration from reviewers of their deliverables. All of the evidence is anecdotal and none of the groups could strongly substantiate their opinions.
Even after dozens of reviews, some stakeholders refuse to sign off on the requirements specification documents because of a few questionable requirements. This puts the projects at risk and creates tension between the participants. What should the lead BA do first?

One of the processes within requirements analysis is to prioritize requirements. As a business analyst why would you ever want to prioritize requirements?

You are the business analyst for your organization and are working with Ralph who is also a business analyst at your company. You have moved one of the requirements higher in the prioritization of the requirements because it is needed to be implemented before some of the more important requirements are done. Ralph disagrees with your placement of the requirement because you are to rank the requirements based on their level of difficulty.
Who is correct and why?

What two factors must the business analyst consider when conducting stakeholder analysis?