NTT DATA Business Analytics Interview Questions & Answers
Curated interview practice questions with answers. These are practice scenarios, not a verified list of past interview questions.
About NTT DATA hiring for Business Analytics roles
NTT DATA is a global IT services company and part of the NTT Group of Japan. It provides consulting, application services, cloud, infrastructure, data and testing services for clients in many industries. Its India delivery centres hire for software engineers, test engineers, data engineers, data analysts and infrastructure professionals.
For Business Analytics roles, this NTT DATA practice set focuses most on SQL for Business Analysis (5), UAT and BA Documentation (5), Requirements and Agile (5), Business Metrics and KPIs (4). It has 17 easy, 22 medium, 1 hard questions, so you can start easy and work up to the harder ones.
Company type
IT services
Headquarters
Tokyo, Japan
Main India offices
Bengaluru, Pune, Noida, Hyderabad, Chennai
NTT DATA Business Analytics interview process
Online assessment (aptitude + technical)
Technical interview
Managerial round
HR round
Typical pattern based on public candidate experiences. Rounds vary by role, team and year.
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01
Write an Excel formula for the weighted average selling price across orders.
// B2:B200 = price per unit, C2:C200 = units sold
=SUMPRODUCT(B2:B200, C2:C200) / SUM(C2:C200)
// a simple AVERAGE(B2:B200) would wrongly give a small order
// the same weight as a large one
02
What is user activation and what is an 'aha moment'?
Activation is the point at which a new user first experiences the product's core value, such as completing a first lesson, sending a first payment or creating a first project. The aha moment is the specific early action that strongly predicts long-term retention, found by comparing retained and churned users. Teams then design onboarding to get more new users to that action quickly and track the activation rate.
03
Write a SQL query to get each customer's first order date and first order amount.
WITH ordered AS (
SELECT customer_id, order_date, amount,
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY customer_id
ORDER BY order_date, order_id) AS rn
FROM orders
)
SELECT customer_id, order_date AS first_order_date,
amount AS first_order_amount
FROM ordered
WHERE rn = 1;
04
During UAT, users log 60 defects, but you suspect many are actually new requirements. How do you handle it?
Run a joint triage with the business owner, QA and development. Compare each item against the signed-off requirements and acceptance criteria. Real defects stay in the defect log; items not covered by requirements are reclassified as change requests and prioritised separately through change control. Keep the tone neutral so users do not feel dismissed. Also review why the gap happened, for example prototypes were not shown early enough, and fix that for the next release.
05
What is the difference between Definition of Ready and Definition of Done?
Definition of Ready is a checklist a story must meet before the team pulls it into a sprint: clear description, acceptance criteria, dependencies identified, designs attached and estimated. Definition of Done is the checklist for calling work complete: coded, reviewed, tested, acceptance criteria passed, documented and deployable. The BA mostly drives readiness, while the whole team owns done. Both reduce rework and arguments at sprint end.
06
What is a data dictionary and why does a business analyst maintain one?
A data dictionary is a catalogue of data elements used in a system or report: field name, business definition, data type, length, allowed values, mandatory or optional, source system, owner and example values. A BA maintains it so business users, developers and testers use one definition, for example what counts as an active customer. It prevents mapping errors in integrations and migrations, speeds up testing and reduces disputes about why reports do not match.
The total profit expected from a customer over the relationship, roughly average margin x purchase frequency x lifespan, compared with acquisition cost.
TAM, Total Addressable Market, is total demand for the product if every possible customer bought it. SAM, Serviceable Available Market, is the part you can reach with your model, geography and channels. SOM, Serviceable Obtainable Market, is the share you can realistically capture in the next few years given competition. For an online tutoring startup in India, TAM is all school students, SAM those online in target cities, SOM a small share of that.
09
After joining orders to a payments table, your total revenue doubled. What went wrong?
The join created a fan-out: some orders have more than one payment row, such as split payments or retries, so each order amount is repeated. Check the grain by counting rows per order_id on both sides. Fix it by aggregating payments to one row per order in a CTE before joining, joining on the full key, or summing from the table whose grain matches the metric. Always compare row counts before and after a join.
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.
11
Write a DAX measure that shows each category's percent share of total sales.
Agile delivers value in small increments with feedback. Scrum organises work in sprints with planning, daily stand-ups, review and retrospective, led by a Scrum Master and Product Owner.
13
What is the difference between a task and a sub-process in BPMN?
A task is an atomic unit of work that you do not break down further in the diagram, such as Verify PAN details. A sub-process is a compound activity that contains its own flow of tasks, events and gateways, shown with a small plus sign when collapsed. Sub-processes keep high-level diagrams readable: the main map shows Credit Check as one box, and a separate detailed view explains its internal steps.
A balanced scorecard is a strategic performance framework that tracks objectives and KPIs across four perspectives: financial (revenue growth, margin), customer (NPS, retention), internal processes (cycle time, defect rate) and learning and growth (training hours, employee engagement). The idea is that financial results are lagging, so leaders also need leading measures of what drives future performance. A strategy map links the objectives with cause-and-effect arrows from people to processes to customers to financial outcomes.
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.
16
A subscription app starts the month with 8,000 customers, gains 1,200 and loses 400. Calculate churn and net growth.
Churn rate uses customers at the start: 400 divided by 8,000 gives 5 percent. Ending customers are 8,000 plus 1,200 minus 400, which is 8,800. Net growth is 800 divided by 8,000, or 10 percent. Do not divide churned customers by the ending count, since new joiners who have not had a chance to churn would understate the churn rate.
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.
Stakeholders and the sponsor review the Business Requirements Document for completeness and accuracy, and the business owner gives formal sign-off before design begins.
The BCG matrix classifies business units or products by market growth rate and relative market share. Stars have high share in high-growth markets and need investment. Cash cows have high share in slow markets and fund the rest. Question marks have low share in fast markets and need a decision to invest or exit. Dogs have low share in slow markets and are candidates to divest. It guides portfolio resource allocation.
21
What is the difference between a process, a procedure and a work instruction?
A process describes what happens end to end to achieve an outcome, across roles, such as customer onboarding. A procedure describes how one part of that process is carried out and who is responsible, such as the KYC verification procedure. A work instruction is the most detailed, step-by-step guide for a single task, often with screenshots, such as how to upload a document in the CRM. BAs usually model processes and reference the other two.
22
What is the difference between a sprint review and a sprint retrospective?
A sprint review is held at the end of the sprint with stakeholders to demonstrate completed work, gather feedback and adjust the backlog; it is about the product. A sprint retrospective is an internal team meeting afterwards to discuss what went well, what did not and what to improve in the way of working; it is about the process. The BA often helps demo stories in the review.
23
Describe a time your analysis found a cost-saving opportunity.
Situation: monthly cloud and software subscription costs had grown 35 percent in a year without anyone tracking why. Task: my manager asked me to review them. Action: I combined invoices with user login data in Excel and found 140 licences unused for over 90 days and two tools doing the same job. Result: we cancelled unused licences and consolidated tools, saving about 18 lakh rupees a year, and I set up a quarterly licence review report.
24
What is feature adoption rate and how do you measure it?
Feature adoption rate is the share of eligible active users who used a feature in a period. For example, if 4,000 of 20,000 monthly active users used saved searches, adoption is 20 percent. Measure it against eligible users only, track first use and repeat use separately, and compare retention of adopters versus non-adopters. High first use with low repeat use often means the feature is discoverable but not valuable.
25
Three departments describe the same order process in three different ways during workshops. How do you arrive at the true AS-IS?
Treat each version as a hypothesis. Walk the process physically or observe real cases end to end, and pull a sample of 20 to 30 recent orders from the system to trace what actually happened. Compare timestamps and status changes with each department's story. Then hold a joint session, show the evidence-based map and mark the variants openly. Often all three are partly right because different order types follow different paths, which should be modelled explicitly.
Strengths and Weaknesses are internal; Opportunities and Threats are external. Example: S = strong faculty, W = low brand awareness, O = AI upskilling demand, T = free online content.
27
What are MRR and ARR, and how do you calculate net revenue retention?
MRR is monthly recurring revenue from active subscriptions; ARR is the annualised figure, usually MRR times 12. Net revenue retention measures revenue kept from an existing customer cohort over 12 months: (starting MRR + expansion - contraction - churned MRR) / starting MRR. Example: 100 lakh start, plus 15 expansion, minus 5 contraction, minus 8 churn gives 102 percent. Above 100 percent means existing customers grow revenue even without new sales.
28
A business tester raises a defect, and the developer closes it as 'works as designed'. How do you resolve it?
Go back to the requirement and acceptance criteria. If the system matches the agreed requirement, the developer is right, and the business need is a change request. If the requirement is unclear or the design misread it, it is a defect, and the requirement wording should be fixed. Discuss it in triage with both parties, using examples. Either way, close the loop with the tester so they understand the outcome and keep trusting the process.
29
What are the steps to publish and share a Power BI report with your team?
Save the .pbix and click Publish, choosing the team workspace. In the Service, set data source credentials and, for on-premises data, configure the gateway. Schedule refresh. Then share by giving workspace access to editors, or package it as an app for viewers, and apply row-level security roles if needed. Finally, check it on web and mobile and send the link with a short note on what each page answers.
30
A ride-hailing app's ride cancellation rate rose from 8 to 14 percent. How would you structure the problem?
First split by who cancels: riders or drivers. For rider cancellations, check wait times, pickup accuracy, price surges and changes in ETA. For driver cancellations, check trip distance, payment mode, low fares, destination visibility and incentive changes. Then segment by city, time of day and area. Link to recent changes like a new pricing rule. Recommend fixes for the largest driver, such as better matching or adjusted incentives.
A data object (page shape with a folded corner) represents information that an activity needs or produces during one process instance, such as an invoice or an application form. It is linked with dotted associations. A data store (cylinder) represents information that persists beyond the process instance, such as the customer database or ERP. Showing them helps developers see which systems are read or updated at each step and helps spot missing integrations.
32
How would you decide whether to launch a new product?
Assess market size and demand, customer need, competition, unit economics, capabilities, risks and strategic fit, then test with a pilot before scale-up.
33
Compare Import mode, DirectQuery and Live Connection in Power BI.
Import copies data into the compressed in-memory model, giving the fastest visuals and full DAX, but data is only as fresh as the last refresh and size is limited. DirectQuery sends queries to the source at view time, so data is near real time but visuals are slower and some DAX is restricted. Live Connection points to an existing published semantic model or Analysis Services model without its own model. Composite models mix Import and DirectQuery.
34
The scheduled refresh failed overnight and leadership reviews the dashboard at 10 am. What do you do?
Check the refresh history error first: expired credentials, gateway offline, source schema change or timeout. Fix the quick cause and trigger a manual refresh. If it cannot be fixed in time, inform the stakeholders early, state the last refreshed date clearly on the report and share the key numbers from a direct query if needed. Afterwards add refresh failure alerts and a data-as-of label so it never surprises anyone.
35
What steps do you follow to plan and run a UAT cycle?
Plan: agree scope, entry and exit criteria, testers and schedule with the business owner. Prepare: write scenarios and test cases from requirements, set up the environment and test data, and brief testers. Execute: run test cases in daily sessions, log defects with evidence and hold a daily triage. Monitor: report progress, pass rate and open defects by severity. Close: check exit criteria, get the business sign-off with known issues documented, and hold a short lessons-learned review.
Send an agenda with the goal and the decisions needed beforehand, along with any pre-read. Invite only people who contribute or decide. Start by restating the goal, keep to time, park off-topic issues and confirm decisions aloud. End by summarising actions with owners and dates. Send minutes within a day. A meeting without a clear decision or output usually could have been an email.
The time value of money means a rupee today is worth more than a rupee in the future, because today's rupee can be invested to earn a return and future money carries inflation and risk. Future cash is converted to present value using PV = FV / (1 + r)^n. At a 10 percent discount rate, 1,10,000 rupees received after one year is worth 1,00,000 rupees today. It is the basis of NPV, IRR, loan EMIs and valuation.
38
What is the difference between DELETE, TRUNCATE and DROP in SQL?
DELETE removes selected rows using a WHERE clause, logs each row and can usually be rolled back inside a transaction. TRUNCATE removes all rows quickly by deallocating data pages, keeps the table structure and normally resets identity counters; rollback behaviour depends on the database. DROP removes the whole table, including its structure, indexes and permissions. Analysts mostly use DELETE carefully on staging tables and should rarely need TRUNCATE or DROP on production data.
A UAT test plan defines how acceptance testing will be run. It covers scope and out-of-scope items, business processes to be tested, entry and exit criteria, roles such as testers, UAT lead and sign-off authority, test environment and test data, schedule and cycles, defect management process with severity definitions, communication and reporting, and risks. The BA usually drafts it with business owners so testers know exactly what they are accepting and when.
40
What is the difference between SQL and Excel for analysis?
Excel suits small to medium data and quick ad-hoc work; SQL queries large databases directly and repeatably.
Tips to crack the NTT DATA Business Analytics interview
Revise SQL, testing and programming fundamentals for both the online assessment and technical interview.
Learn about NTT DATA's Japanese parent and its global integration of companies such as Dimension Data.
Be ready to discuss working with clients across time zones, as many teams support global accounts.
Keep a one-minute story ready for every project on your CV: problem, your part, tools, result.
Practise the hard questions on this page aloud; NTT DATA interviewers usually ask follow-ups on your first answer.
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are there in the NTT DATA Business Analytics interview?
Candidates usually go through 4 stages: Online assessment (aptitude + technical); Technical interview; Managerial round; HR round. The exact rounds change with the role, team, location and your experience, so confirm the process with the recruiter.
Which topics should I prepare for the NTT DATA Business Analytics interview?
This practice set leans on SQL for Business Analysis (5), UAT and BA Documentation (5), Requirements and Agile (5), Business Metrics and KPIs (4). Revise those first, then practise explaining one or two of your own projects end to end, because most NTT DATA interviewers ask you to walk through real work.
Are these the exact questions asked at NTT DATA?
No. These are curated practice questions that match the skills and difficulty usually tested in it services interviews like NTT DATA's. They are not a leaked or verified list of past questions.
Where does NTT DATA hire Business Analytics professionals in India?
NTT DATA has large teams in Bengaluru, Pune, Noida, Hyderabad, Chennai. Openings and locations change often, so check the NTT DATA careers page and filter by city and experience.
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