PMP (Project Management Professional) Exam 1

The critical path can have negative total float in the case that there is a constraint set on the project finish date or positive float in the case where the project is ahead of schedule. Typically, however, the critical path has zero float.

According to Tuckman, the stages of team development are Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, and Adjourning.

Just because there is a process in place for documenting and updating issues does not mean that it is an effective process. Tammy should analyze whether there are problems with the process and make any needed updates to it. Forwarding a copy of the log and telling the stakeholder to review it may work in the short run but would not fix the problem if there is truly an issue with the process. Taking no action would annoy the stakeholder further and not solve the problem.

PDM, also called Activity-On-Node (AON), is the method used by most project management and project planning software packages.

The dependency between the two activities is a Finish-to-Start (FS) type because the second activity can start only after the completion of the first one. There is also a time lag of 15 days before the second activity can start.

The correct response is that you would explain to the manager that you would need to formally document these as part of a project scope change and put it through the change management process. Complying with the manager’s request is incorrect and violates the code of ethics and professional responsibility that you have towards your organization. Refusing to take up the changes may be too drastic a step.

While speed and flexibility are important qualities for an agile project, the most important cultural norm for change is a safe, honest, and transparent environment. Encouraging execution over exploration is more indicative of an environment suited towards predictive methods.

Part of acquiring resources involves verifying if the costs of the selected team members will fit within the project budget. If virtual team members are an option, then special communication protocols will need to be put in place to minimize misunderstanding and conflict. Creating the staffing management plan would take place during the plan resource management process, and sending team members to training would occur during the develop team process.

A fishbone diagram (also called cause and effect analysis or Ishikawa diagram) is used in the Identify Risks process to determine the potential risks that might affect the project.

Informing the customer of the impacts to project scope and other constraints, then crashing the cost and schedule is the best approach. Arbitrarily trimming estimates or scope without directly advising your customer is dishonest, while simply refusing to make a change is unprofessional.

The risk register is the document that evolves throughout the risk management processes.

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The first action after receiving any change request is to analyze the impacts. Then after comparing the impacts to the plan you may need to issue a change request to modify the project scope. Raising the issue to the project sponsor is also possible once you are aware of the impacts of the change.

Inputs of the Develop Project Charter process are:

• Business Case
• Agreements
• Enterprise Environmental Factors
• Organizational Process Assets

According to the PMBOK^® Guide (6th Edition), inspections and audits required by the buyer and supported by the seller as specified in the procurement contract can be conducted during execution of the project to verify compliance in the seller’s work processes or deliverable. If authorized by contract, some inspection and audit teams can include buyer procurement personnel.

Asking team members to write documentation on past products is an inefficient way to attain information. Asking team members to handle it on their own will likely not be successful since their reporting of the issue to you is an indication that this has not worked so far. Speaking to the team members who are not sharing the information may be necessary at some point.

However, the most important action for you now is to attempt to improve the culture. Informal and face-to-face interaction is the best way to begin to build trust so that people will be more willing to share information. Additionally, emphasizing the objectives and need for the project reinforces the shared vision that you are attempting to align everyone around.

Adding one additional person to an eleven-member team adds 11 additional communication channels, which can increase complexity. Eleven members have 55 communication channels, and 12 members have 66 channels:

N ∗ (N − 1) / 2 = # of communication channels for the team where N = the number of members.

So there are 66 − 55 = 11 channels added.

Predictive and Waterfall are similar since waterfall is a type of predictive approach. The fact that there will be frequent change implies that this type of approach may not be suitable. Scrum is also risky since the customer will not always be available to the team and the team has mixed experience.

A hybrid approach is the best option. In a hybrid lifecycle, those well-known and fixed elements can follow a predictive life cycle, and those that are still evolving can be done with an adaptive approach. This may involve running two portions of the project in parallel or doing the change aspects first until the requirements are better known (i.e., the adaptive portion precedes the predictive portion). A hybrid approach is also ideal for training team members on Agile methods.

Bidder Conferences (also called vendor conferences, contractor conferences, or pre-bid conferences) are meetings between buyers and all prospective sellers prior to the submittal of bids or proposals. They are used to ensure that all sellers have a clear and common understanding of the procurement and that no bidders receive preferential treatment. Responses to questions are incorporated as procurement document amendments. To be fair, buyers must ensure that all sellers hear every question from individual sellers and every answer from the buyer.

The key problem with working 25–50% on a project is that multitasking from one project to another affects the whole team’s productivity. Bill likely has the skills needed, or the other product owner wouldn’t have asked for him. Generalists and T-shaped people are sought after for Agile teams, so this would not be a problem. We don’t know enough about Bill’s workload to know if he would be dissatisfied.

Sunk costs are the costs that are expended in the past. Sunk costs should not be considered when deciding on continuing a project.

The WBS Dictionary is a detailed description of work packages and their attributes including any technical documentation for each WBS element.

In this situation your are taking the Acceptance strategy. Acceptance is adopted when there is no possibility to eliminate all threats from a project. This means the project team has decided not to change the project management plan to deal with a risk or is unable to identify a response strategy. This strategy can be active or passive acceptance. Passive Acceptance: No action except documenting the strategy and leave project team to deal with the risks as they occur. Active Acceptance: Establish a contingency reserve (time/money/resources).

The only report that best suits to the needs of senior management is the milestone report. The rest of the mentioned documents include a lot of redundant or detailed information for this purpose.

Tom as the project manager has the ultimate responsibility of acquiring the resources on time. In this situation he should use the negotiation tools and techniques to acquire the project team. Of course other items might also be correct in some situations, but the first most responsible way is to do negotiation with the functional managers.

When crashing a project you will always crash those tasks that have the smallest crash cost. While all of these answers will give you a 4 week reduction in duration, crashing tasks C & E is the cheapest option:

Task A = 6,500
Tasks C & E = 2,000 + 3,500 = 5,500
Tasks B & D = 2,500 + 3,500 = 6,000
Tasks D & E & F = 3,500 + 3,500 + 4,000 = 11,000

The cost baseline or project budget is developed in the Determine Budget process which is a planning process in project cost management.

Rolling wave planning involves planning near-term items in greater detail than those that are further off in time.

Early termination of a contract is a special case of procurement closure that can result from a mutual agreement of both parties, from the default of one party, or for the convenience of the buyer if provided for in the contract. The rights and responsibilities of the parties in the event of an early termination are contained in a terminations clause of the contract.

Stakeholder cube, the Salience model, and the Power/Interest grid are stakeholder mapping and categorization techniques and are used in the Identify Stakeholders process. Stakeholder engagement assessment matrix allows the team to analyze the variance between what the existing and desired engagement levels of the stakeholders are and is used in Plan Stakeholder Engagement.

Checking back with the team member to verify the effectiveness of the training is the most appropriate next step. It is the job of the project manager to not only recommend training opportunities for their team but to ensure that the training was effective.

It may be a good idea to tell their supervisor that they will be taking the training. However, it is not clear that mentoring is needed until the project manager has had an opportunity to assess how well the training went. Additionally, it is the responsibility of the project manager, rather than the functional manager, to see to it that a mentor is assigned since the skills in question are needed for his project. Reassigning tasks and asking for a client extension would be premature and might be unnecessary. Although the pace has slowed, there is no indication from the question that the project is behind schedule.

Direct costs belong to project resources which can be scaled down or reduced. Variable costs depend on the amount of work performed by resources. Therefore, there is a higher opportunity to reduce it by reducing the scope and amount of work required.

Since this is a case of project closure before its completion, as a project manager the BEST thing to do for you is to make sure the steps to close a project are followed. Project Closure Guidelines in Organizational Process Assets are the best source of information in such a situation.

The project charter is the document that officially authorizes a project and gives the project manager the required authority to assign resources to the project.

Closing out a contract involves administrative activities such as finalizing open claims, updating records to reflect final results, and archiving such information for future use. Procurement Close could be done at any stage of the project and is not associated only with Close Project or Phase process.

Pre-assignment involves selecting project team members in advance. It occurs when specific people were promised as part of the project proposal, the project is dependent on expertise of particular persons, or staff assignments are defined within the project charter.

Quality measures are not an attribute of the cost of non-conformance. The cost of non-conformance result in some kind of a loss or rejection of the project’s output.

Identifying stakeholders and understanding their relative degree of influence on a project is critical. Failure to do so can extend the timeline and raise costs substantially. An important part of a project manager’s responsibility is to manage stakeholder expectations and develop a strategy to keep them satisfied.

PMI’s Code of Ethics requires all project managers to comply with all laws and regulations. Failure to immediately and actively disclose that a regulatory requirement has not been addressed puts the company and the project manager in the position of breaking the law.

The key to this question is that it is a change-driven (i.e., Agile) project and the team has experience with this type. A servant leader style is most effective for this environment. Empowering a team to self-organize and work collaboratively and eliminating bottlenecks are characteristics of such a leadership style.

A detailed schedule with milestones will not benefit the team’s performance, particularly if the work will be accomplished via a product backlog. Similarly, a change control procedure is generally not needed for change-driven projects since change is built into the system between iterations or sprints.

The best approach to deal with the problems is to confront them. In this situation you should respectfully confront the resource about this behavior, and notify the customer about the situation. Failing to confront the resource or intentionally excluding a required resource from a project is unprofessional, and could negatively impact the project.

This is the situation where the risk response happens after the trigger which is the sudden shut down of an operational unit in the company. Some responses are designed to use only if a specific event occurs. It is appropriate for the project team to make a response plan that will be executed only under certain predefined conditions (triggers like missing intermediate milestones). The risk response occurs BEFORE the risk and tries to alter the probability and/or impact while the contingency plan only occurs AFTER the trigger (usually the risk event) and focuses only on changing the impact.

The Schedule Performance Index (SPI) is a measure of the project performance in terms of the time schedule. SPI < 1 shows that the project is behind schedule.

The key to this question is that a deliverable is due soon, and the team conflict is putting that goal in jeopardy. The most efficient action for you to take is to have the team agree on ground rules that they can then hold themselves to. A team charter typically includes operating guidelines, decision-making criteria, and communication expectations. Enrolling a team in training may be of use long-term, along with a networking event but will not help the immediate situation. It is never a good idea to inform the sponsor there may be a delay due to a situation that you, as the project manager, are ultimately accountable for.

A Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) illustrates association between work packages/activities and team members. It makes it easy for team members to view all the project activities for which a particular person is assigned, and the level of their responsibility.

Without the budget to hire and with resources already being limited, it is not feasible to find someone who is already experienced. Scrum master training is a possibility but seeing as the team member has experience on Scrum projects, she is likely already familiar with what a scrum master role entails. Assigning her an agile coach who can work with her throughout the project is the most feasible option.

Test-driven development is a quality practice that drives defects down. Since this is a quality issue, this would be the best option. Transparency, more frequent retrospectives, and the agile mindset are important agile practices and attributes, but they will not help the quality issue.

After determining elements such as the roles and responsibilities, reviewing recruitment practices, and negotiating for staff, project team members are assigned to project activities as part of the Acquire Resources process.

An inspection is a tool and technique for the Validate Scope process, while the other options are all the tools used for the Collect Requirements process.

Negotiation is used while performing the Conduct Procurements process. The other answer choices are performed during the Control Procurements process.