PMP (Project Management Professional) Exam 2

This is an example of the application of the rule of seven in control charts. If you have seven data points in a row on the same side of the mean, statistically the mean has shifted, calling for action to correct the problem. Therefore, the first action is to find the cause of the errors.

Since this is problem that has occurred and not a risk, there’s no need to add it to the risk register. The Identify Risks process will need to be redone, but since this is a problem, the first action is to come up with a solution for it. Creating a workaround is a solution. You might need to inform management as well, but this is reactive, not proactive, and not the first thing you should do.

According to the list of activities, activity H has float and is not critical. Therefore, changing its sequence to perform it sooner will not change the project finish date. The best way is to complete the critical activities earlier.

According to the PMBOK^® Guide (6th Edition), a quality audit is a structured, independent process to determine if project activities comply with organizational and project policies, processes, and procedures. In this specific case you need to do quality audits to make sure that your team is doing the project reporting in accordance with the project policies and standards.

According to the PMBOK^® Guide (6th Edition), when closing the project the project manager must review all the prior information from the previous phase closure to ensure that all project work is completed and that the project has met its objectives. Since project scope is measured against the scope management plan, the project manager reviews the scope baseline (part of the project management plan) to ensure completion before considering the project closed.

Conflict can come from seven main sources, of which the first three account for 50%:

1. Schedules
2. Project priorities
3. Manpower/human resource availability
4. Technical opinions
5. Procedural or project administration
6. Costs
7. Personalities

According to the PMBOK^® Guide (6th Edition), scheduled training occurs as stated in the Human Resource plan and could include online, classroom, on-the-job, etc. Unplanned training, however, takes place through conversation, observation and project performance appraisals conducted during the controlling process of managing the project team.

Risk Transference is a risk response strategy that shifts the impact of a threat to a third party, together with ownership of the response. Taking out insurance or a warranty transfers the risk from the owner to the other party.

As the project manager you are responsible to evaluate the situation before making any decision about the change. This is the first step of the integrated change control. After a complete review of the new features you can realize the possible impacts of the change in terms of quality, risk, etc. on the project.

Tacit knowledge, which is the information and belief system a team member has within their minds and realm of experience, is not documented or codified and must be drawn out by others in order to utilize that knowledge. Therefore, unlike explicit knowledge, which is written down, it is more difficult to share. However unlike explicit knowledge, which lacks context and can therefore be open to interpretation, tacit knowledge has context built into it. Refer to section 4.4 of the PMBOK^® Guide for additional info.

In this situation, leveling the resources will generally increase the duration. Since the network diagram cannot be changed, the fast tracking option is also not feasible. So crashing remains as the best option in this situation to decrease the duration.

In a meeting with team members you need a tool which shows the schedule details such as delays, completion, and timeline.

Such meetings or interviews are usually done as part of Qualitative Risk Analysis. This method draws on experiential learning and historical data to quantify the impact of risks on project objectives. Read the question carefully. It mentioned that the purpose of the interviews is to gather information about some risks, not to discover some risks.

The project charter formally authorizes the existence of a project, and provides the project manager with the authority.

Even though it may not directly affect the time or cost of the project, you need to look at all the impacts of a change on other project constraints. The change may increase risk, reduce quality, etc. As a project manager the best thing to do is to know all of the impacts of a change before taking any other action.

The control limits are set based on the company’s quality standard and indicate the acceptable range. Upper and lower control limits are usually set at +/− 3sigma.

A focus on getting things right the first time fits with a plan-driven rather than a change-driven approach. The other answer choices describe helpful strategies in an Agile project approach. Agile work should occur at a manageable pace.

Validate scope is primarily concerned with acceptance of deliverables while control quality is primarily concerned with correctness of the deliverables. Control quality is generally performed before scope validation but these two can be performed in parallel. Validate scope can be done at the end of each project phase in the project life cycle and at other points throughout the project as part of M&C, i.e. validate scope is done multiple times in the project.

Reserve Analysis is one of the techniques which is used in more than one process. Three processes of Estimate Costs, Determine Budget, and Control Costs are the Cost Management processes that use this tool.

All of the incorrect answer choices refer to possible root causes of a variance in the costs. If any of these proves to be the root cause, then the corrective action might result in increasing the actual costs. However, trying to find ways to increase the actual costs is not the first thing to do.

An unexpected loss of project resources due to company downsizing that results in a schedule slip must be communicated to project stakeholders immediately. It would be unfair to penalize the resource by cancelling his vacation simply because it is the easiest way to get back on schedule. Finding other resources by the project manager also doesn’t seem to be possible in this situation.

There are 3 different paths in the diagram and we can calculate their duration as:

• A-D-F = 4 + 10 + 8 = 22 days
• B-C-E-F = 5 + 7 + 8 + 8 = 28 days
• B-C-D-F = 5 + 7 + 10 + 8 = 30 days

Among the above mentioned paths, B-C-D-F has the longest duration. A-D-E-F which is mentioned as an answer choice is not actually a complete path because activity D is not a predecessor of activity E.

Leveling the resources would generally increase the project duration. Removing the activities under some conditions and using the project change process (discretionary dependency) might be possible but considering that dependencies are preferential and you have extra resources the first thing could be to make more activities concurrent.

You are in the Identify Risks process because root cause analysis tools can help identify potential threats based on past experience of issues experienced. Root cause analysis is used in both quality management and risk management. However, the situation explained in this question refers only to the information gathering techniques of the Identify Risks process.

According to the PMBOK^® Guide (6th Edition), to close the contract, all procurement documentation is collected, indexed, and filed. Information on contract schedule, scope, quality, and cost performance along with all contract change documentation, payment records, and inspection results are cataloged. This information can be used for lessons learned and as a basis for evaluating contractors for future contracts.

The Gantt chart is only a representation of the project schedule, not an analysis method. The precedence diagramming method is a diagramming technique that deals with the relationship between activities, not schedule flexibility. Resource leveling is used to smooth the use of the resources over a period of time. The only option that deals with schedule flexibility is the critical path method which uses activity floats.

You never list changes in the scope management plan or in the project charter. As the project manager you need to make sure that changes are needed and beneficial and also to make sure that the stakeholders get notified.

According to the PMBOK^® Guide (6th Edition), the contingency reserve may be a percentage of the estimation, a fixed number, or may be developed by using quantitative analysis methods such as a Monte Carlo simulation. Therefore, it would be incorrect to start with a zero value for contingency reserves.

Since the only document that you have is the project charter, you are still in the project initiating phase and none of the planning documents have been generated yet. So the project scope statement and the resource plan are not correct answers. The magazine article could be correct if it was mentioned that the article gives some applicable insights, particularly about the risks involved in your project.

A fixed price contract is synonymous with a lump sum contract. This type of contract involves a fixed total price, or a lump sum, for a well-defined product.

According to the PMBOK^® Guide (6th Edition), resource calendars identify times when the project team members can participate in team development activities. If the team members are unable to find time for such activities, it is likely that the calendar has been poorly planned out

The contents of the risk management plan according to the PMBOK^® Guide (6th Edition) are methodology, roles & responsibilities, budgeting, risk categories, definition of risk probabilities and impacts, probability & impact matrix, revised stakeholders tolerances, reporting formats, and tracking. Basically the risk management plan describes how risk management will be structured and performed on the project. It does not identify individual risks or the probability of their occurrence.

Agile projects, such as Scrum, do not utilize a formal change control procedure since doing so would slow the team down. The product owner instead is authorized to approve changes. They would not add this feature to the sprint backlog, however, since the team is already committed to the scope for the current sprint. Therefore, adding the feature to the product backlog and reprioritizing the backlog is the best answer.

Close Project or Phase is the process of finalizing all activities across all of the Project Management Process Groups to formally complete the project or phase.

The source selection criteria are the primary tools for evaluating potential sellers and should be used by the entire team in order to make a selection.

The project scope statement is an output of the planning process group, so it cannot be available as an input to the initiating process group. The other options are among the Enterprise Environmental Factors or Organizational Process Assets which are inputs of the initiating process group.

EV= $120,000
AC= $110,000
PV= $150,000
SPI= EV/PV
SPI= 120,000/150,000
SPI= 0.8
Since SPI is less than 1, we can conclude the project is behind schedule.

Servant Leadership is the best approach for a change-driven project and when the team is experienced. They can be best served by your ability to remove obstacles for them and play interference with other managers and potential distractions.

Quality metrics are an output of the Plan Quality process and an input to the Manage Quality process. The other choices are all benefits of quality audits.

The Stakeholder engagement assessment matrix (SEAM) enables you to plot whether stakeholders are resistant, neutral, supporting, or leading in their attitude towards the project. Based on where you would like each of these stakeholders to be, you can plot strategies to gain their support. Not every stakeholder will require a strategy, so it is important to plot where each is desired to be.

Lessons learned are a part of Organizational Process Assets. The Project Manager should update this with the procurement experience so that future projects can benefit. Organizational Process Assets Updates are an output of Control Procurements.

Read the question carefully. You as the project manager have not been involved in the project charter development, therefore it is your responsibility to make sure that the charter is complete and all of the stakeholders have their inputs in it before proceeding with the next step in project planning.

Small autonomous teams that have earned the trust of project stakeholders are characteristics of an adaptive culture. The fact that the team is receiving regular feedback is another clue that an iterative, incremental lifecycle is likely being followed.

Collaborating or problem solving is the best way to resolve conflict but not in this situation. Since you should choose a technique to deal with the conflict immediately and it’s explained that there is an urgent meeting on an important issue in your critical project that you that you need to take care of, the best method in this situation would be to delay the conflict resolution, i.e. smoothing.

The best guideline is to ensure that there is sufficient detail on the user stories in the sprint backlog so that work can begin. User stories for the entire project do not need to be created nor described in detail for work to begin. Only those user stories that will be in the next iteration require sufficient detail. User stories do not need to be similar in size.

According to the PMBOK^® Guide (6th Edition), analogous estimating is a technique for estimating the duration or cost of an activity or a project using historical data from a similar activity or project.

You are close to performing the final product handover to the external client. Scope validation deals with acceptance by the customer. Without this acceptance, you will not be able to move into the next project phase.

Costs of non-conformance are costs incurred when a project fails to meet the required level of quality. Failure costs are also called costs of poor quality. Costs of non-conformance are categorized into 2 groups:

1.) Internal failure costs — Before releasing product to customer. Includes costs to rework, fix defects, wastage due to internal errors, and unnecessary advertising.

2.) External failure costs — After releasing product to customer. Liability and penalties cost, warranty costs, cost of developing and distributing fix, support calls, and damage control costs.

In a cost plus percentage of costs contract, the buyer pays all costs while the costs are not limited. In a fixed price type of contract, the buyer has the least cost risk, as any cost overruns are borne by the seller.

This question is about accountability. A team charter that is created by the team means that the team is accountable for enforcing it. They may need a reminder that this is the purpose of the charter, and they need to be trusted to hold themselves to it.