PMP (Project Management Professional) Exam 3

Individual and Team Assessments are a technique of the Develop Team process. In such an assessment, team members receive feedback from project managers. Managers can gather information from those who interact with the team member using 360-degree feedback principles.

According to the PMBOK^® Guide (6th Edition) the scope baseline includes the WBS, WBS dictionary, and the project scope statement.

With Agile, it is assumed that many things are not going to be correct upfront. Therefore, there will be a failure, but adapting and making corrections is appropriate. If a team focuses on getting things correct before acting, then they will lose the speed and agility in the method. All of the other answers are important qualities in a change to an agile mentality.

The process of Identify Risks is originally categorized as a planning process. However, this process is iterative because unknown risks can be discovered throughout the life cycle of the project.

The only choice that correctly addresses the problem at hand is the one that includes stakeholder expectation management.

Since there are dependencies to the external projects and those projects should provide you with critical and major deliverables, the biggest concern must be the risks that other projects may cause to yours. It would be better to prevent those problems in the Plan Risk Response process than to just spend effort controlling or validating scope.

Verifying that a product meets specifications is part of Monitoring and Controlling.

Quality audits and design for X would not be used during control quality. Instead, they would be utilized during the manage quality process.

Since this is an external customer, the only document that it can create is a change request. The rest of the options are in the responsibility of the project manager or project sponsor. Changes must be formally controlled using the change control system.

Notify the stakeholders immediately that there is project delay due to a resource that is no longer available. Once the stakeholders are aware of the situation and its impact to the project, a path forward can be developed. Project managers are required to provide timely and accurate project information at all times, and to follow all project processes and policies, as per the PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. Making contingency plans without input from the stakeholders is a violation of this code.

It is clearly mentioned that this is an emergency situation, and normally there is not enough time in emergency situations to have a clear statement of work or subcontractors requirements. Instead, you probably need to use a cost plus contract with some incentives to motivate the contractor for on-time delivery without expanding the scope.

Team Building activities help develop trust and help establish good working relationships. Ongoing communications are a part of Team Building Activities. It is a tool used in Develop Team. Especially when the teams become remote, the importance of ongoing communication increases in building trust among the team members.

You should notify the appropriate management immediately that incorrect information has been presented for your project. The PMI Code of Ethics requires that managers report the errors of others, and provide accurate and truthful information to project stakeholders at all times. Doing nothing or quitting the company are both passive and unethical.

The issue log is a tool used in the Manage Team process. According to the PMBOK^® Guide (6th Edition), an issue log is used to document and monitor who is responsible for resolving specific issues by a target date.

In order to be on the safe side, the best option is to choose the resource who is working on the activity with the greatest float. This is activity F.

The best course of action is to fully understand the consequences of the lower competency of the team members. That is only possible if you incorporate the changed level of competency in the activity duration estimations and the project schedule accordingly. Keeping the schedule as it is would not solve the problem. It is too soon to ask for overtime or inform the stakeholders about the delay, considering that the project is in its early stages and you still don’t know the exact effects of the lower competency of the team members on the schedule.

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.

A project charter is created during project initiating. A project manager is assigned during project initiating, not after it.

Performance reviews is a tool and technique of Control Quality. Design for X, Root cause analysis and Problem solving are all Manage Quality techniques however Design for X involves optimizing around an identified variable and Root cause analysis helps reveal the issue but does not go so far as to work towards and define a solution. Problem solving involves finding a long-lasting solution to a problem by identifying it, analyzing it, choosing the best solution of the alternatives and putting the solution into action.

By developing a management plan it will dictate the rest of your actions, such as meeting with your team. You will also need a management plan before checking CPI and/or SPI.

As a project manager you cannot eliminate some stakeholders or consider their requirements according to their degree of importance or influence. You have to consider the requirements of all stakeholders.

The most reasonable and responsible way of facing such a problem would be to find a solution to overcome the project late completion. Of course in the next step, if you find that there’s no schedule compression possible, you might choose another option.

Influencing is an Interpersonal and Team skill used by Implement Risk Responses and is helpful when those responsible for carrying out the risk response are not part of the project team or have other demands on their time. The other techniques are not used by the Implement risk response process.

The first thing to do is to understand the situation. In order to do that you need to document the situation and find out the reasons why the customer is not signing off. After doing so, you should inform your management.

Refuse the request and explain to your manager that you are obligated to adhere to all quality management plans for the project. Failing to do so would not only deliver a possibly defective product to the customer, but is also a violation of the PMI Code of Ethics. The Code requires project managers to follow all project processes and polices.

Recognizing the risk and not changing the plan, but making some contingencies in the event the risk is triggered, is an example of active acceptance. Passive acceptance would be if no contingencies were put in place and avoidance would be correct if the project plan were modified to accommodate the risks.

Smoothing is a method that only aims at minimizing the severity of the conflict, but it does not try to eliminate the source of conflict or find a permanent solution. Forcing is one of the worst methods of conflict resolution. However, it has long-term effects.

The first action should be to analyze the situation. Finding the cause of the cost overrun is the only one of the options that is relevant to analyzing the situation.

Changes are not bad! Changes normally come from lack of input at the beginning of the project. If we begin effective communication with this stakeholder early, we stand a much better chance of discovering their changes during the planning process when they will have less of an impact on the project. Trying to eliminate the stakeholder is the wrong approach.

This is called an external dependency. It involves a relationship between project and non-project activities.

You need to ensure that the deliverables have been tested and verified. The idea is that you never want to show the customer a deliverable that hasn’t first been tested and shown to meet its requirements before asking them to accept it.

Re-estimating of the project costs is probably required, but it is not a direct response to the budget overrun problem. Indirect expenses are costs associated with the project and it is not truthful to get them off the project reports. Crashing is not relevant in this situation because there’s no mention of schedule delays. Therefore, you should use your project reserves to cover the budget overruns.

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.

The control limits are the dashed lines above and below the mean. ‘Within the specification limits’ is the only answer to address this correctly. Since control limits are the measure you use to determine quality, it follows that your quality should exceed your customer’s need. Otherwise you probably would not do the work. To exceed customer needs, the control limits should fall within the specification limits which are determined according to the customer’s needs.

Activity duration estimates are quantitative assessments of the likely work periods to complete an activity. They should not include any lag or lead information

On a control chart, a source of variation that is intermittent, not inherent in the system, and not predictable, is called a Special or Assignable Cause which is an unusual event.

Outputs of the Close Project or Phase process include archives, lessons learned, and project closure. However, some project resources (people, computers, telephones) must be used to perform these closing activities. Once completed, the project can release its resources.

The “halo effect” refers to the tendency to move people into project management because they are good in their technical fields. This happens frequently, especially in technical companies.

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.

The project manager has more power in a strong matrix organization. In a strong matrix organization the project managers have authorities comparable to that of functional managers and normally they are not under the supervision of the functional managers. In a weak matrix organization the project manager is organizationally under the supervision of a functional manager who is given the project responsibilities.

The first step in a misunderstanding is to determine the root cause of the misunderstanding. If there was an error in the design, then this will cascade to other areas. If there wasn’t an error, then you can walk the customer through all of the project artifacts and determine where there may have been a misunderstanding. Once everyone agrees on what happened, then a path forward can be planned.

According to the PMBOK^® Guide (6th Edition), a workaround is a response to a threat (or problem) that has occurred for which a prior response had not been planned or was not effective. Therefore, any time there is no contingency plan in place, but the risk which happened must be addressed, the response is called a workaround.

The Define Scope process will result in the development of the Project Scope statement and updates to project documents such as the stakeholder register, requirements documentation, and the requirements traceability matrix.

There’s no mention in the question that the schedule is required on an urgent basis, so you need to follow the steps to get to a project schedule. The project scope statement and other planning activities must be completed before a schedule can be created.

According to the PMBOK^® Guide (6th Edition), the project coordinator reports to a higher-level manager and has authority to make some decisions. The project expeditor has no authority to make decisions.

The use of insurance to shift the negative impact of a risk, in this case burglary, is an example of risk transference.

Resource leveling is a schedule network analysis technique. It is applied to a schedule that has already been analyzed by the critical path method.

You would need to report the status accurately to the customer even if it means losing some revenue. Reporting that each team member has spent 37.5 hours a week is both inaccurate and ethically wrong.

Funding limit reconciliation is one of the tools and techniques used in the Determine Budget process. This will reconcile the availability of funds with their expenditure and it will necessitate the scheduling of work to be adjusted to smooth or regulate the expenditures.

The description is one of a weak matrix organization where the project manager does not have much power. In a weak matrix organization the project manager has a role which is closer to a coordinator or expeditor than a manager.