Exam 74-674 - Delivering BVPS

Firstly in case you don't know what BVPS is you can read more on it here.
To be able to deliver a BVPS engagement you need to complete Exam 74-674 first, which I passed on Monday.

Several people have since asked me what to study for the exam, so here is a post on my views.

Firstly I had a bit of head start on it as I was lucky enough to deliver a beta engagement here in Melbourne with assistance from Microsoft and Value Prism Consulting so I got to learn how to deliver an engagement first hand. This of course is the best preparation possible but presuming you don't get a chance to do this then the below info I hope will help a bit.

The first thing you should do is look through everything on the resources page for BVPS here

Then think carefully if you have the right skill set. If you consider yourself a techie do not sit this exam. The skills you need for this are much closer to the BA skill set. However if you consider yourself a "traditional" BA this is probably also not for you either. The ideal skill set is someone that can do process analysis but then also map this to solutions in the office system. You need to be able to do this quickly both in the exam and during a BVPS engagement so it helps if you can do both of these things yourself with minimal assistance. Have a look at the sample agenda's and consider if you can map a existing process, future state process, come up with a high level solutions for doing this with the office system including value propositions etc in those kind of timeframes. This is not easy !!

What I would then suggest if possible is try running a mock enagement ideally get some buy in from your company and try it internally for real. Some things to focus on that I think are important:

• Work out how to determine what the right process is to analyse. Look for the key important factors such as business impact, availability and buy in from stakeholders among other things. Also pick something you can analyse during the timeframe, this may just be a piece of a larger process.
  
• Map the current process without jumping into solution at all. The idea is not to solve the problem yet but to work out what the current situation is.
  
• Work out what can be changed at a process level to improve it. Listen to the users in order to do this, they generally have plenty of suggestions for what will likely work in this space, although not all will be possible/realistic. Also don't bite off too much , small incremental changes often work better than one sweeping change.
  
• Map this to solutions using parts of the Office System i.e. know when to use Performance Point vs. Portfolio Server or SharePoint etc. Also make sure you are not reinventing the wheel, often the solution is just using something the customer already has in a better way.
  
• Determine the high level value propositions for the business. Make sure they map to the goals of the business and align with what the stakeholders have told you. Know how to work out figures to back up your business case.

That's a lot of what you need to be able to do to deliver a BVPS enagement and hence what you need for the exam, but the training material has fine detail.

The exam itself is a bunch of case studies each with a set of questions. Normal exam advice applies here i.e. make sure you read the case study and questions very carefully, small details can change the answer a lot.

Hope that helps. Good luck :)

UPDATE

The zip file of training material on the BVPS site has been updated and now includes sample exam questions among other new resources so make sure you download it again.