ACCA P3 Business Analysis

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Exam date
18 June

Examiner: Steve Skidmore


ACCA course notes

Free ACCA P3 June 2012 notes

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Note:These course notes are not meant to replace study texts. To succeed in your exam, you need to get updated Revision kit from an ACCA approved publisher.

Copyright: Selling or profiting in any way from these notes without our permission is prohibited. If you would like to use our course notes in your college, please check our OpenLicence for details.


ACCA video lectures

Free ACCA P3 Lectures

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ACCA revision

ACCA P3 Revision lectures

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P3 question practice

It seems that some of the main-stream P3 revision kits do not address the new or enhanced areas in the syllabus very well.

Recent articles in SA magazine will certainly help you with the theory:

Business strategy and pricing (Feb 2011)

Business forecasting and strategy (Jan 2011)

Project management (Oct 2009).

You should also look at the examiner’s article ‘Business analysis – changes to the syllabus from June 2011? (Aug 2010).

All articles are listed at http://www.accaglobal.com/students/acca/exams/p3/technical_articles/

It is also very important to look at the new P3 current pilot paper

However, that still leaves you with few practice questions to try.

Therefore, OpenTuition hopes to publish some questions and answers (not necessarily full 25 mark questions) that will provide you with question practice in the new syllabus areas.


ACCA P3 Revision Tests:

New P3 test – SWOT Implications Test

In doing a SWOT analysis in the exam it is important not just to say something like: “Weakness: Little spent on R&D”.
That would be doing little more than copying part of the question onto the answer sheet. Always think about consequences: try putting ‘therefore’ after the item identified to make you state consequences.
Take on line our new test for Paper P3

QUIZ – P3 Model Application Test

In P3 you need to be able to apply models to question scenarios, and usually the model that would be useful is not specified, or not specified directly.
See if you can identify which model would probably be most useful in the following circumstances.


Tips for ACCA P3 June 2012 exam

Q1 Strategic position and analysis; corporate parenting
Q2 Communicating mission and core values (see recent ACCA SA article)
Q3 Project gateways, project lifecycle and project initiation document
Q4 Expected values/decision tree. Process improvement
Q5 Benchmarking

Please Note

Tips should not be relied on – they are only intelligent guesses.

Their only purpose is to give you suggestions for topics to concentrate on in your last few days of preparation. Do not exclude other topics from your overall preparation.


Examiners Recommended Reading

Primary Texts:

Johnson G, Scholes K and Whittington R, Exploring Corporate Strategy: Text and Cases: Enhanced Media Edition (Enhanced Media Text & Case) Prentice Hall

Harmon P,Business Process Change: A Manager’s Guide to Improving, Redesigning, and Automating Processes (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) (2003)

Chaffey D, E-Business and E-Commerce Management,Prentice Hall (2004)

Bratton J and Gold J, Human Resource Management: Theory and Practice (2003)

Secondary texts:

Tricker R and Sherring-Lucas B, ISO 9001: 2000 In Brief: 2000 in Brief (In Brief) (2001)

Pande P and Holpp L, What Is Six Sigma? McGraw-Hill (2002)

Grundy T and Brown L, Strategic Project Management, Thomson Learning (2002)

Schwalbe K, Introduction to Project Management, Second Edition (2006)

These books are recommended by the examiner . If you are having problems with a particular paper, or if you want to do extra reading out of interest, then you might them useful.

The most efficient way of obtaining them is from Amazon in the UK.