e1d1 Flashcards
You are a construction project manager and have been recently hired in a well known company as the manager of a highly crucial project. The project is expected to be completed in 2 years. During the project initiation phase you realize that some regulatory and environmental requirements have not been considered in the contract.
Failure to meet the mentioned requirements will negatively affect your company’s reputation, but meeting them will require more time and cost, which will lead to budget and time overruns. In that case, there’s also a chance that the client decides to cancel the project. What would you do in that situation?
A. Your first and immediate action is to disclose your discovery to the project stakeholders and solicit their viewpoints.
B. This requires a scope change notification that should be written immediately.
C. Since this is only a probability it does not need an immediate action. Just try to gather more information as the project goes ahead and decide later on.
D. As a seasoned construction project manager, contact the regulatory body to find out some workarounds for your project.
A. Your first and immediate action is to disclose your discovery to the project stakeholders and solicit their viewpoints.
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.
Your sponsor will be leaving your project soon due to other obligations. She informs you that her role will be filled with two new people. She assures you that this should not affect the communication complexity of the team since you are only going from eleven to twelve members. Is your sponsor correct?
A. Yes, because the sponsor is always right.
B. Yes, adding one additional person adds only one more communication channel for an eleven-member team.
C. No, Agile teams should be as small as possible.
D. No, adding one more person adds more than one communication channel for an eleven-member team.
D. No, adding one more person adds more than one communication channel for an eleven-member team.
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.
You are managing a software development project which should be completed in 18 months according to the project contract and schedule. Your customer has recently faced regulatory changes that require your project to be finished 2 months earlier and he asks you to do so. How will you approach this situation?
A. Inform the customer of the impacts of his requirement to project constraints and, after getting the required approvals, crash the project.
B. Accept the customer’s request and cut parts of the project scope to meet the new deadline.
C. Stick to your original schedule and tell the customer that once the contract is signed the project duration won’t change under any circumstances.
D. Cut the duration of all project activities across the board to meet the requirement.
A. Inform the customer of the impacts of his requirement to project constraints and, after getting the required approvals, crash 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.
According to the contract, your customer has assigned one of his staff to your project office to attend the meetings and contribute to the decision making. However, this person is too confrontational and his behavior to your project team members is intimidating. What should be your action in this situation?
A. Ask the customer to replace the person.
B. You unilaterally decide to isolate the person and don’t let him in the project meetings.
C. Since the person is assigned by your client you don’t have any authority over him, so don’t do anything.
D. Confront the person about his behavior and its impact on the project. Also, inform the customer about the issue.
D. Confront the person about his behavior and its impact on the project. Also, inform the customer about the issue.
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.
The majority of the project management software applications use the ——— method to build the project schedule network diagram.
A. Leads and Lags
B. Critical Diagramming
C. Precedence Diagramming
D. Activity-On-Arrows Diagramming
C. Precedence Diagramming
PDM, also called Activity-On-Node (AON), is the method used by most project management and project planning software packages.
You have just been assigned to a new change-driven project. The team has never worked together before, but they are experienced with agile techniques. Which TWO of the following techniques would be most useful for promoting your team’s performance?
A. Creation of a detailed schedule with regular milestones.
B. Allow the team to collaboratively develop a plan to execute the project.
C. Expose and eliminate communication bottlenecks.
D. Creation of a change control procedure so that only needed changes are addressed and implemented.
B. Allow the team to collaboratively develop a plan to execute the project.
C. Expose and eliminate communication bottlenecks.
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.
To formally authorize the project, which of the following documents is necessary?
A. Project Statement of Work (SOW)
B. Project Charter
C. Business Case
D. Project Contract
B. Project Charter
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.
The photo transfer project will be starting in a few weeks, and it is up to you to decide which project methodology the team will use. You have some concerns about the project because the customer will not always be available, and the team has mixed experience in agile methods.
Also, even though the sponsor is quite supportive in allowing you to choose whichever approach is best, he has given you a warning. He suggests that you be prepared since this particular customer is known to be demanding and changes their mind frequently based on the latest market intelligence they’ve heard. After reviewing the situation, which method would be most appropriate?
A. Scrum
B. Predictive
C. Hybrid
D. Waterfall
What is photo transfer project?
C. Hybrid
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.
You are a project manager and you are about to perform the risk management processes. Which one of the following documents evolves throughout the risk management processes?
A. Risk Mitigation Plan
B. Contingency Plan
C. Risk Profile
D. Risk Register
D. Risk Register
The risk register is the document that evolves throughout the risk management processes.
As a project manager you are performing scope management processes. What is the function of the WBS Dictionary?
A. Used as a glossary to define the acronyms used in the project scope statement
B. It is used for the planning of the project resources
C. Used as a glossary to define the acronyms used in the project WBS
D. Describes the details of each component in the project WBS
D. Describes the details of each component in the project WBS
The WBS Dictionary is a detailed description of work packages and their attributes including any technical documentation for each WBS element.
