TOGAF 9 OG0-091 Part2 – Sample Questions

1. Sample Question 1

Okay, this is the third sample question for the part two exam. I’ll get right into it. JT enterprises manufactures door handles and door frames for the construction industry and has a national presence every day. Their factories produce 450,000 metallic door parts that need to be correctly sorted, packaged, and delivered to the right customer. Although ten years ago their technology was a bit of a mess, they’ve really improved a lot with it. JT has been investing in its architectural practice over the last few years. The architecture team has grown in size, systems are fitting together better than ever, and a lot of the long term structural problems with their business processes have been smoothed out. In general, all business stakeholders have been pretty happy with the progress. The baseline architecture has been well documented and kept up to date.

They’ve done a few cycles through the adm, and their entire team is now comfortable following the process. They follow proper architecture guidance techniques, requirements management, monitoring and capture change requests. It’s now time for the next cycle of the adm to start, and you have a handful of change requests that have been building up over the past year that you need to address this time through. You’ve also put together a business case to move to an iterative model of adm as a way to improve the process. All stakeholders have bought into your approach, and it’s been agreed that iterative is the way to go moving forward, which iterative approach is most appropriate for this company. So you’ve got four answers on screen A-B-C and d. I’ll just read the summaries of them. Baseline first, target first, baseline first for a different reason, and target and baseline. Those are the four approaches that the company could take.

So what I would do at this point is I would immediately, once they see a question that has terms, definitive terms listed for the togas spec, I would immediately flip over to the togas spec. I would look up adm iteration and I would see if there are any clues, any definitions, anything that would, that would give us a hint of the answer. So what we’re looking for is chapter 19 of TOGAF. Okay, so there’s an iteration applying iteration to adm is the name of the chapter, and 19. 4 is a section under chapter 19 that says approaches to architecture development. So there are basically two approaches that can be adopted within the adm.

So one is the baseline first, which we saw as one of the answers. So in this style, the assessment of the baseline is used to identify problems and improvement opportunities. And it’s most suitable when the baseline is complicated and not clearly understood or agreed upon. And the second is target first. And this is where you do the target solution first, and then you try to map it back to your baseline. And so essentially, this process is suitable when target is agreed at a high level, and the enterprise just wanted to efficiently transition over to that. So here we have the first clues out of what we know about this company, JT enterprises. We know that they’ve been through the ATM a few times and that the baseline is pretty well documented, that they’re relatively mature architecturally, they’ve been doing it for a while, and so it’s going to hopefully be a bit evident which is the better approach. So we’ll get right back to I always say eliminate the worst answer first.

So in this case, the answer d that says target and baseline. There is no approach that’s called target and baseline. And even if there was, it doesn’t really make much sense because what you’re saying is work on both things at the same time. Okay, so that’s not really iterative at all. You’re not working on target first and then looping back to work on baseline or baseline first and looping back to work on target. Working them on them both at the same time doesn’t make much sense. And so this is clearly a zero point answer. It’s completely wrong. There’s not anything about this statement that is correct. There’s no such thing as target and baseline approach. So that’s a zero point answer. Now we’re left with these three answers.

Now we know baseline first, target first, baseline first. Those are all real approaches, and so we can’t just eliminate them purely based on a wrong terminology. But if you read through them, you can get a clear understanding of which one is not really describing the proper architecture. So according to TOGAF, baseline first is when the baseline is complex or not well understood or agreed upon. Okay, but in our example, the baseline is well under documented, well understood, and so that leads us to the opposite approach, which is the target first approach.

So we already almost know target first is the correct answer. But to complete the process, which of the baselines is the most incorrect? So question a answer a says baseline first allows you to discover new opportunities. That is actually what baseline first is. So it is the correct definition of it, even though it’s the wrong approach. Answer c says baseline approach. The baseline first approach is relatively quick and easy because they’ve been through it a few times, so that’s technically true. But that’s not why TOGAF recommends a baseline first approach. Okay, so out of those two answers, I would say c is the most incorrect. It’s the one point answer, and out of the remaining answers, that means a is a three point answer, and that means target first approach is the right answer because the company has a good grasp of its baseline architecture. All right, so there’s another example for you. Hopefully you can see by going to the spec, looking up the definitions of the words, I was able to pinpoint the correct answer relatively quickly.

2. Sample Question 2

Hi there. Okay, we’re going to talk about another sample question. Sample question number two. This question I’ll read for you. Thompson Medical was established in 159 to manufacture medical supplies for hospitals and medical centers across the northeast United States. They are recognized as leaders in the field and their products appear in 75% of all hospitals in the areas they serve. They have over 6000 employees, many of them sales staff, who sometimes need to travel out of the office to see customers and procure orders. The sales staff have been complaining for some time about having to bring their laptops and their printers with them for these sales visits. And they would like a more modern solution that uses tablet technology and doesn’t even require a printer.

The head of your It department has serious concerns. However, the United States has some serious privacy laws around healthcare and it would be a severe disaster to the company’s reputation if any information was to be leaked. The It head would need a lot of reassurance that any mobile solution is secure from hackers and would be easy to maintain access with all of those mobile sales staff. You believe you have a solution using the TOGAF methods. You’ve documented the baseline and target architectures across all four of the architecture domains and you’ve laid out a clear roadmap for implementation. The head of It has looked at these documents and does not see how his concerns have been addressed, even though you know that they have. So what do you need to do to convince the It head that the solution is in fact secure? So this is again another type of long winded question. There’s different elements to it. They give you the company history, a little bit about the problem they’re facing, a little bit of the solution that you’re proposing.

But you’ve got this one individual who is extremely important, it appears, that is saying he does not see his concerns being addressed. And so what do you do? So here are the four answers that we’re proposing. Answer A says, using adm iteration, you should return back to the beginning of phase B and go back through all of your Bdot phases, ensure those concerns have been really addressed. Answer B is to go to an outside evaluation of the security using a pen testing firm which will prove the solution secure through actual penetration testing of the networks and applications. Option C is to modify the existing requirements and the definition documents and all the roadmaps and all of those outputs to add much more security information to those documents. And option D is to develop a security view of the target architecture that focuses mainly on the security aspects of those designs.

So we always go back to the scenario and we say, really, what is relevant? If we eliminate all of the relevant stuff? The whole history of the company again, is usually not relevant. Sales staff having concerns, I mean, it’s somewhat relevant because that’s how you came to this security mobile solution, but it’s not relevant for this question. Now here is wily the crux of the problem. The head of the It department has serious concerns. So the head of the It department is a stakeholder, okay? And he’s an important stakeholder.

So right now, head should be thinking about stakeholder management. The United States has privacy laws. I’m going to leave that as relevant. The It head needs reassurance that it’s going to be secure. Going on to the next part, you’ve done everything, you’ve gone through all the Bdot phases. So you know, you’re past B, C, and D. You’re into E, possibly F because you’ve created Roadmaps and you’re planning for implementation. And the head of It has looked at these documents as an important stakeholder and does not see how his concerns have been addressed. And that right, there should be a big red flashing neon sign for you that this is the crux of our problem here. So first let’s eliminate the worst answer. I always like to do that. Again, this is my number one recommendation for this test is once you get that zero point answer out of the way, things become a little easier.

So I’ve chosen the answer B as the zero point answer as the worst answer. It says solicit an outside evaluation of security using a pen testing firm. Okay? So the thing about answer B is that it’s measuring penetration testing and it’s talking about doing actual testing of networks. So if we are in the design implementation phase, like I said, it’s E or F, we’re not really talking about pen testing at this time. Now we could offer pen testing as one of the mitigations to the solution to say, we will definitely do pen testing on this solution, get an outside agency, but this is not the time to do the actual pen testing. And you don’t have a solution.

You don’t have something to test. And even if you interpret this to mean that you’ll just send them the documents and they’re going to look over the documents and give the okay that it’s secure, which is not literally what it says, but that wouldn’t work. Because if the head of it, of your own company doesn’t see the security being documented, then the outside firm is not going to see things that don’t exist. So answer B eliminated zero points. Do not choose B. Now we have AC and D and they’re really, I would say, reasonable solutions. That’s why they’re partial point answers because they’re not really going to be completely out of the weirdness there. So really the crux of what we discovered in the scenario is the head of It doesn’t see his concerns being addressed, even though you think they would be addressed. So this is a problem of stakeholder management. And what we really need to do is refer to stakeholder management within TOGAF and see those steps that you use to manage stakeholders. Okay, so those are the three options. Now let’s start to eliminate some more. I think the first answer using adm iteration, returning to phase B and then going back through all of those design stages. I guess if you didn’t address those concerns, if you discovered, you know what, we didn’t really think about security too much, then you may have to go back and use admiration to go back and redo this. Okay, but that’s not what is being said in the scenario.

The scenario is talking about it is addressed, but he’s not seeing it. So this is sort of the worst of the remaining answers. Answer C that says modify existing requirements, all the definition documents, all the roadmaps to add much more security information to those documents. That’s a kind of reasonable answer you’re going to want. There’s a lot of stakeholders that are going to want that information. Maybe not the head of security. Head of it is not the only one. But in general, just to alleviate the concerns of one stakeholder, even if he is an important stakeholder, you don’t necessarily need to go and modify all your existing documents. There are abilities within TOGAF such as a thing called views. And answer D is why we’re picking this as the five point answer. Because you can create specific artifacts specifically around security.

You can put the network diagrams on there, the firewalls. There’s lots of things you can do that address those concerns that the head of it might want to see, that the head of finance doesn’t really need to see, that the CEO doesn’t need to see, that other people don’t need to see. So really the best answer, the five point answer is option D, which is the security view. So again, views are whatever you use to address stakeholder concerns. You don’t go and modify every single document just for a single person and even, especially if it’s something really technical and you’re going to talk about firewalls in your roadmap document that’s probably over the head of a lot of people who need to read that document. So you do that through a view. Okay, so that is the second option. That’s the second sample question, how I would have addressed it. And hopefully this is starting to make sense. Really. You just have to get rid of a lot of the irrelevant things. Focus on what the scenario is saying, focus on what they’re asking, and you can start to at least narrow it down to one or two correct answers. All right, thanks guys.

3. Sample Question 3

Okay, this is the third sample question for the part two exam. I’ll get right into it. JT enterprises manufactures door handles and door frames for the construction industry and has a national presence every day. Their factories produce 450,000 metallic door parts that need to be correctly sorted, packaged, and delivered to the right customer. Although ten years ago their technology was a bit of a mess, they’ve really improved a lot with it. JT has been investing in its architectural practice over the last few years. The architecture team has grown in size, systems are fitting together better than ever, and a lot of the long term structural problems with their business processes have been smoothed out.

In general, all business stakeholders have been pretty happy with the progress. The baseline architecture has been well documented and kept up to date. They’ve done a few cycles through the adm, and their entire team is now comfortable following the process. They follow proper architecture guidance techniques, requirements management, monitoring and capture change requests. It’s now time for the next cycle of the adm to start, and you have a handful of change requests that have been building up over the past year that you need to address this time through. You’ve also put together a business case to move to an iterative model of adm as a way to improve the process. All stakeholders have bought into your approach, and it’s been agreed that iterative is the way to go moving forward, which iterative approach is most appropriate for this company. So you’ve got four answers on screen A-B-C and d. I’ll just read the summaries of them.

Baseline first, target first, baseline first for a different reason, and target and baseline. Those are the four approaches that the company could take. So what I would do at this point is I would immediately, once they see a question that has terms, definitive terms listed for the togas spec, I would immediately flip over to the togas spec. I would look up adm iteration and I would see if there are any clues, any definitions, anything that would, that would give us a hint of the answer. So what we’re looking for is chapter 19 of TOGAF. Okay, so there’s an iteration applying iteration to adm is the name of the chapter, and 19. 4 is a section under chapter 19 that says approaches to architecture development. So there are basically two approaches that can be adopted within the adm.

So one is the baseline first, which we saw as one of the answers. So in this style, the assessment of the baseline is used to identify problems and improvement opportunities. And it’s most suitable when the baseline is complicated and not clearly understood or agreed upon. And the second is target first. And this is where you do the target solution first, and then you try to map it back to your baseline. And so essentially, this process is suitable when target is agreed at a high level, and the enterprise just wanted to efficiently transition over to that. So here we have the first clues out of what we know about this company, JT enterprises. We know that they’ve been through the ATM a few times and that the baseline is pretty well documented, that they’re relatively mature architecturally, they’ve been doing it for a while, and so it’s going to hopefully be a bit evident which is the better approach.

So we’ll get right back to I always say eliminate the worst answer first. So in this case, the answer d that says target and baseline. There is no approach that’s called target and baseline. And even if there was, it doesn’t really make much sense because what you’re saying is work on both things at the same time. Okay, so that’s not really iterative at all. You’re not working on target first and then looping back to work on baseline or baseline first and looping back to work on target. Working them on them both at the same time doesn’t make much sense. And so this is clearly a zero-point answer. It’s completely wrong. There’s not anything about this statement that is correct. There’s no such thing as target and baseline approach. So that’s a zero-point answer.

Now we’re left with these three answers. Now we know baseline first, target first, baseline first. Those are all real approaches, and so we can’t just eliminate them purely based on a wrong terminology. But if you read through them, you can get a clear understanding of which one is not really describing the proper architecture. So according to TOGAF, baseline first is when the baseline is complex or not well understood or agreed upon. Okay, but in our example, the baseline is well under documented, well understood, and so that leads us to the opposite approach, which is the target first approach. So we already almost know target first is the correct answer. But to complete the process, which of the baselines is the most incorrect? So question an answer a says baseline first allows you to discover new opportunities. That is actually what baseline first is.

So it is the correct definition of it, even though it’s the wrong approach. Answer c says baseline approach. The baseline first approach is relatively quick and easy because they’ve been through it a few times, so that’s technically true. But that’s not why TOGAF recommends a baseline first approach. Okay, so out of those two answers, I would say c is the most incorrect. It’s the one-point answer, and out of the remaining answers, that means a is a three-point answer, and that means target first approach is the right answer because the company has a good grasp of its baseline architecture. All right, so there’s another example for you. Hopefully you can see by going to the spec, looking up the definitions of the words, I was able to pinpoint the correct answer relatively quickly.