Sample exam questions international business game, intended to give you an idea

about the exam style to expect. Questions try in most cases to check you understood
the topic and can apply it by getting into the skin of the customer or provider.
Remark: the answer hints here below are in most cases not the full correct answer,
but tips/hints on which direction your answer could go.
Disclaimer: this sample exam does not offer the guarantee the topics interrogated
during the real exam will match below questions.

Q1
Context: engagement cycle
Your company is delivering a set of services to a customer since a couple of years.
This contract is now running to an end.
Question:
What can happen now ? What is your (as service provider) preferred solution ?
(Answer hint: The customers procurement officer will be very much in favour of
issuing again an RFP/RFI. You as service provider should try to get a contract
renewal avoiding RFP/RFI e.g. using the skills of your engagement manager)

Q2
Context: assumptions
You issued an RFP for a service desk. The RFP answer from your supplier has a
paragraph containing following phrasing:
We assume that for all standard service requests to be performed by the service
desk, complete and good quality written documentation is available
You realise the state of your documentation is lousy and this will backfire.
Question:
What will happen if you do nothing about this text paragraph?
Can you think of a better strategy then doing nothing? Explain your approach.
(Answer hint: If you do nothing, your service provider will formally notify you after
contract signature that a contract condition is not met, and he needs extra money to
get this documentation written. You could try to bluf that there are too many
assumptions, and this one has to be removed else you will not sign. Or you could add
the phrase that no extra costs can be charged for this aspect. Or you could ask to
remove this assumption from the contract text promising the supplier can look at it
during due diligence (an hope he does not do a good job of verifying this)

Q3
Context: Due Diligence
Your customer is asking for a binding price proposal. You ask for due diligence, and
your customer agrees for that, but only after contract signature.

Question:
What should your engagement manager do now? Why ?
(Answer hint: Require pre-contract diligence as prerequisite for a binding price
proposal or try to link price corrections with post contract due diligence.)

Q4
Context: Service Catalogue Pricing
Your customer, a Swiss manufacturer of cash dispensers (ATMs) , is asking for a
price quotation to have mail service (managed mail) for its employees. They want a
price proposal which can handle a drop or an increase in number of employees
needing mail access. Some managers require a large mailboxes (25 GB).
Sometimes, for legal reasons, a mailbox needs to be restored.
Question:
Come up with an adequate pricing structure
(Answer hint: Price elements you could have are for example:
Fixed part mail system per month
Price per mailbox per month
Price per restore
Uplift per mailbox per month for a large mailbox
Important are that most services need a fixed part an a part which is dependent on
a volume. Up to you to see what those are, in order to never arrive in a situation
where you will be losing money
Q5
Context: riskmgmt
Your company, McAmee, has a central site in Brussels and a smaller office location
in Ghent. You want to create synergy by having all of your employees in one site.
You are preparing to close down the Ghent site (40 employees) and move the
employees to the Brussels office. The labor unions got word of those plans, and start
reacting.
So, you define a risk:
There is a risk of opposition to the Brussels move, resulting in labor actions with
production loss.
Question:
Under risk management, we have been discussing 4 different response techniques.
For above risk, find for each of the 4 response techniques a suitable response. (so
you design 4 response solutions)
(Answer hint: You need to think about the 4 response techniques, and have an idea
for each of those. For example, for the strategy Mitigate, you can negotiate with the
unions an advantage in kind they get as compensation to avoid a strike. For
example, a nice mobility budget where you can choose for your preferred mobility mix
(public transport, a car budget,...)

Q6
Context: 11-Service Level Agreements-AJ1314
Your customer, an internet service provider, wants to outsource onsite customer
interventions for its residential customers. He comes to you for advice about
formulating an SLA which takes in account priority for the intervention.
Question:
Formulate a SMART SLA target taking in account priority. Make sure this can be
easily evaluated e.g. on a monthly basis.
(Answer hint: (come with different response times based upon
urgent/high/medium/low, best with a % added. For example one of the answer lines
could be: Urgent incident, time to arrive at the customer site <= 8 business hours for
90% of the cases. )
Q7
Context: projplan-costcalc
You want to construct a new warehouse for your business. One of the administrative
things to do is to get the building permit.
Question:
Draw a Gantt chart expressing preparing for the request, requesting, till getting (or
not getting) the building permit. Use appropriate notation, in particular for getting the
building permit
(Answer hint: (your gantt chart needs to contain the activities, arrows expressing the
links, and you typically need here a milestone (diamond) which is the permit being
granted.)

Q8
Context: 03-bidders_conference
Its common practice to allow service providers intending to reply to an RFP to enter
the questions they have using a formal Q&A process. Assume the customer notifies
you all questions and all answers will stay private between you and the customer.
Question:
How does this change your strategy to ask questions ?
(Answer hint:
If case of private answers (no redistribution of Q&A to all parties), you must really
carefully review to ask all what you need to answer the RFP. If you forget to ask
something, you cannot fall back on the questions your competitors will be asking.
Dont overload the customer with questions though: If you give him too much work,
you will irritate him and probably get shorter less useful answers. One dangerous one
is: avoid questions for which you expect that the answer will be quite costly (e.g. the
situation is worse then what could be read in the RFP, so there will be lot and costly
project work to do to get this sorted out). If you ask that question, and get that answer
causing quite some work, you will have to solve it in your RFP answers. Parties not
asking this will not address this, so have a cheaper solution and might win the deal.

In such a situation, dont ask the question but add an assumption about it in your
RFP with a quite favorable (less costly) situation description.)