Cisco Business Analytics Interview Questions & Answers

Check row counts against the source, nulls, duplicates on keys, value ranges, date coverage and that totals reconcile with finance reports.

Define churn, analyse who leaves and why, segment customers, find drivers through data and surveys, design retention offers and measure uplift with a control group.

Functions that summarise rows into a value, such as COUNT, SUM, AVG, MIN and MAX.

Functional requirements describe what the system does (login, reports); non-functional ones describe how well it does it (speed, security, availability, usability).

Product, Price, Place and Promotion, the levers a business uses to bring an offering to market.

It breaks a top metric into drivers: Revenue = Users × Conversion × AOV; Users = New + Returning, and so on. It shows which lever to pull and where a drop came from.

Compare the current state (as-is) with the desired state (to-be), list the gaps in process, people or technology, and plan actions to close them.

Use STAR: Situation, Task, Action, Result. Show that you listened, found the underlying goal, used data to align people and reached a documented decision.

Review > Protect Sheet or Workbook with a password, lock cells, hide formulas and allow only selected cells to be edited.

WITH m AS (SELECT month, SUM(amount) AS rev FROM orders GROUP BY month) SELECT month, rev, ROUND(100.0 * (rev - LAG(rev) OVER (ORDER BY month)) / LAG(rev) OVER (ORDER BY month), 1) AS mom_pct FROM m;

Identifying everyone affected by the project and mapping their influence and interest to decide how to communicate with and involve each group.

Profit = Revenue minus Cost, where revenue = price x volume and cost = fixed + variable. Split each part to find which one explains a change.

CAGR = (End value / Start value)^(1/years) - 1, entered as =(B2/A2)^(1/n)-1.

Stakeholders and the sponsor review the Business Requirements Document for completeness and accuracy, and the business owner gives formal sign-off before design begins.

Interviews, workshops, surveys, observation, document analysis, prototyping and brainstorming, chosen according to stakeholders and project stage.

A named temporary result introduced with WITH that makes long queries readable and reusable in the same statement.

It returns a custom value when a formula errors out, keeping reports clean, for example =IFERROR(VLOOKUP(...), "Not found").

VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP, INDEX-MATCH, SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, IF, text functions, PivotTables and charts.

About 20 million people, roughly 10% order pizza on a weekend, about 1 pizza per 2 people in an order. This gives roughly 1 million pizzas, adjusted for outlets and delivery capacity.

Clarify the underlying goals, present data and trade-offs, facilitate a joint session, escalate to the sponsor if needed and document the agreed decision.

A model classifying features as basic, performance or delight attributes based on how they affect customer satisfaction, helping decide what to build first.

They help the Product Owner refine the backlog, write stories and acceptance criteria, clarify details with developers and support testing and demos.

Aggregate revenue per month and use LAG(revenue) OVER (ORDER BY month) to compute (revenue - previous) / previous.

Check data accuracy, then segment by city, restaurant, time and user type; look at supply, delivery time, pricing, competitors and seasonality before proposing fixes.

Pareto principle: about 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes, such as most revenue from a few customers or most defects from a few issues.

A query nested inside another, used for filtering or calculating values such as customers whose spend is above the average.

A table linking each requirement to design, test cases and delivery status, ensuring nothing is missed and helping assess change impact.

Population about 20 million, adult tea drinkers about 50%, cups bought outside per person around 1 on average. This gives roughly 10 million cups, then adjust for offices and stalls.

Break sales into footfall, conversion and average basket, compare with last year and competitors, and check stock, pricing, staffing and local events.

A UML diagram showing actors and the actions (use cases) they perform with the system, giving a quick view of scope.

Fixed costs stay constant regardless of volume, such as rent; variable costs change with volume, such as raw materials.

A BRD states what the business needs and why. An FRD details how the system should behave to meet those needs (functional specifications).

A column or set of columns that uniquely identifies each row in a table and cannot contain NULL.

Use historical data with FORECAST.ETS or trend lines, state assumptions, compare against actuals and show best, base and worst scenarios.

Clarify the goal behind each request, map them to business objectives, prioritise with MoSCoW, run a joint session, then document the decision and get sign-off.

Low-fidelity layouts of screens that help stakeholders visualise and agree on requirements before development starts.

Clarify the scope, break the problem into logical parts, state assumptions with round numbers, compute step by step and sanity-check the answer.

Every KPI is a metric, but a KPI is tied directly to a strategic goal (e.g. monthly churn). A metric can be any measurement (e.g. page views).

A diagram of steps, decisions and owners in a process, made using BPMN or flowcharts in tools like Visio, Lucidchart or draw.io.

INNER returns only matching rows; LEFT returns all rows from the left table and NULLs where there is no match.

Waterfall runs fixed phases one after another with requirements frozen early. Agile delivers in short sprints with continuous feedback, so requirements can change. In Agile, BAs maintain the backlog and user stories.

Define named scenarios such as best, base and worst with different input values and compare the outputs in a summary report.

Top-down: NCR population aged 18–30 × share of graduates × share wanting paid upskilling × average fee. Cross-check bottom-up with institutes × batches × students × fees. State your assumptions.

Decide whether and how to enter a market by evaluating attractiveness, competition, capabilities and entry mode (build, buy, partner), then risks and next steps.

As a customer, I want to reset my password by email so that I can get back into my account. Acceptance criteria: • Reset link expires in 15 minutes • Password rules are shown while typing • A success message appears after reset

Get distinct user-month pairs, self-join or use LAG on month per user, and keep rows where the previous month is exactly one month earlier.

A chart shows one view of data; a dashboard combines several charts and KPIs on one page for monitoring.

Number of outlets x daily customers x average bill x operating days, then validate using footfall, peak hours and similar chains.

COUNT(*) counts all rows; COUNT(column) counts only rows where that column is not NULL.

Testing how changes in key inputs such as price or volume affect the output, in Excel using data tables or scenario manager.

Separate inputs, calculations and outputs, link all formulas to input cells, add scenarios and checks, and avoid hard-coded numbers inside formulas.

A table assigning Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed roles per task so ownership is clear.

A use case describes the full interaction between an actor and the system (main and alternate flows). A user story is a short statement of need from the user's point of view, refined with acceptance criteria.

The product backlog is the ordered list of all desired work; the sprint backlog is the subset the team commits to in the current sprint.

Both look up values flexibly; XLOOKUP is simpler with built-in not-found handling, while INDEX-MATCH works in older Excel versions.

Split into revenue and cost, then revenue into price, volume and mix, and cost into fixed and variable; check internal factors and external market factors.

Anyone affected by or influencing the project: sponsors, product owners, end users, developers, testers, operations and customers.

Create a table, insert a PivotTable, drag region to rows, product to columns, sales to values, and add slicers for month or channel.

Break-even units = Fixed costs ÷ (Price − Variable cost per unit). Add a data table to test different price and volume scenarios.

AVG ignores NULLs; use COALESCE(col, 0) if NULLs should count as zero, depending on the business meaning.

An early assessment of whether a proposed solution is technically, economically, operationally and legally viable before committing budget.

A model assessing industry attractiveness through supplier power, buyer power, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes and rivalry among competitors.

Clear, testable conditions a story must meet to be accepted, often written as Given-When-Then scenarios.

Top-down: two-wheeler market x EV share x addressable segment. Bottom-up: target households x adoption rate x price. Compare both for a sanity check.

The total profit expected from a customer over the relationship, roughly average margin x purchase frequency x lifespan, compared with acquisition cost.

XLOOKUP can look left or right, uses exact match by default, returns a custom value if nothing is found and doesn't break when columns move. VLOOKUP only looks right and needs a column number.

Reconcile totals with source tables using SQL, check filters and joins for duplication, compare with prior periods and verify with business owners.

Create a line or column chart of actuals and add the target as another series formatted as a line.

SUM(sales) per category divided by SUM(SUM(sales)) OVER () and multiplied by 100 gives each category's share of the total.

An Excel add-in for building data models with relationships and DAX measures over millions of rows, beyond normal worksheet limits.

A what-if tool that recalculates a formula for different inputs, for example loan payments across different rates and tenures.

Use tables, Power Query, remove volatile functions, filter before calculating and move to Power Pivot or a database when rows reach the millions.

Check market size (population, online ordering share), competition, restaurant supply, unit economics per order, CAC and payback period. Propose a pilot with clear success metrics.