Performance Domain Test: Team

You have recently been hired into an organization that is heavily unionized. Some of your project's resourcing decisions have been strongly objected by the unions. You have some collective bargaining agreements with the union that restrict certain role assignments or reporting relationships. This is an example of:

A constraint that limits the resource planning process Constraints can limit the flexibility of the resource planning process. Collective bargaining agreements—contractual agreements with unions or other employee groups—can require certain roles or reporting relationships. The project team may not have direct control over collective bargaining agreements. [PMBOK® Guide 7th edition, Page 72] (Domain: People, Task 6)

You have recently been awarded a grant to conduct a research project. The grant payments are tied to milestones which have a strict schedule. In order to deliver this project, you need to recruit multiple resources at various stages of the project on short-term contracts. Due to cost limitations you cannot hire these resources any earlier or longer than necessary. There is a risk that if the required resources are not available on time, the milestones will slip target dates and the project will risk losing the funding. What should you do?

Analyze the variability of the hiring process and recruit the resources just in time. If the required resources are not hired in time, neither fast-tracking nor crashing will help the project. If the hiring process is time-consuming and highly variable, you need to carefully analyze this and initiate the hiring process just in time based on this analysis. [PMBOK® Guide 7th edition, Page 65] (Domain: People, Task 6)

You are leading an enterprise process mapping project. Your team consists of process analysts and modelers. Process analyst are responsible for gathering process knowledge from organizational SMEs and passing it on to the modelers to map the process. Halfway during the first iteration you noticed that work is getting accumulated in the "Work in Process" and few of these items are being moved to the "Completed" section of your Kanban board. Upon a detailed inspection, you found out that the analysts' throughput is greater than the modelers' throughput, and as a result fewer processes get drafted than what get started. What should you do first?

Ask the analyst to help the modelers complete the processes. Agile teams work as a unit. In order to control the work flow, items in "work in process" has to be limited. If the bottleneck is with the modeling work, analysts should be encouraged to help the modelers complete the processes before new work is taken on. Hiring more modelers seems a lucrative option but that should not be your first course of action. Further, prior to taking such a step, some further analysis would be required. [Agile Practice Guide, 1st edition, Page 66] (Domain: People, Task 2)

Rina and Gimo are the senior developers in a website development project. They have argued about the best web design product to use in developing the new website. As the project manager, you use a forcing approach to make a decision and reduce the conflict. What is the main characteristic of this approach?

Asserting one's viewpoint at the expense of others Project managers must resolve conflicts as early as possible to improve productivity and generate positive working relationships. Forcing is a conflict resolution technique in which one's viewpoint is asserted at the expense of others. [PMBOK® Guide 7th edition, Page 29, 168, 169] (Domain: People, Task 1)

. In Agile teams, a single person's throughput is not relevant. Focusing on a single person's throughput may be risky because it might:

Create a bottleneck for the rest of the team. The throughput of a single team member should not affect the project scope, sprint duration or the cost of the project. However, it might create a bottleneck for the rest of the team members due to the difference in individual throughputs. [Agile Practice Guide, 1st edition, Page 42] (Domain: People, Task 7)

You and your team are about to start a new project. In the past the team has faced issues with estimating user stories and provided inaccurate estimates. All of the following actions can help mitigate this risk from happing on this project EXCEPT:

Develop a team charter. Developing a team charter is a good practice but that cannot mitigate the risk at hand. The other choices are valid mitigation strategies. [Agile Practice Guide, 1st edition, Page 58] (Domain: People, Task 12)

You are managing a complex ERP development project. The overall project team is split into multiple smaller teams based on the area of specializations. Tight coordination of activities and a strict discipline among the team members is required to deliver this project. A team member in your project is constantly providing incomplete deliverables and not performing well. What should you do first?

Discuss the issue with the team member in private Discuss the issue with the team member in private. Conflicts should be first addressed in private, using a direct and collaborative approach. [PMBOK® Guide 7th edition, Page 168] (Domain: People, Task 1)

Your project team is geographically distributed and rely on virtual workspaces. You are considering a number of collaboration tools to boost the team's throughput. Which of the following is one such tool you may consider?

Fishbowl window House of quality and fishbone diagrams are quality management tools. A discount window is a monetary policy instrument which is totally irrelevant to the question. A Fishbowl window is a long-lived video conferencing link between various locations. [Agile Practice Guide, 1st edition, Page 46] (Domain: People, Task 11)

An Agile project team is currently struggling with meeting customer's expectations regarding rapid feature delivery while maintaining required quality standards. Upon further analysis, it was revealed that the throughput of the testers was significantly less than the throughput of the developers. In this scenario, which of the following cannot help the situation?

Increasing the number of developers. The problem at hand is the mismatch of the productivity of the different team members. Increasing the number of developers will further aggravate the situation by increasing the development throughput even further. The rest of the choices need to be further analyzed and the best option should be selected. [Agile Practice Guide, 1st edition, Page 42] (Domain: People, Task 7)

Two of your team members are constantly arguing with each other about work assignments. Due to their attitude, the project is delayed, and pressure is building on other team members. What should you do?

Meet with them to understand their concerns One of the mandatory standards in the PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct is respect. A project manager must listen to others' points of view and understand them. Hence, you must meet with the team members first to understand their concerns. If the problem continues, you may issue a memo or even replace the team members if necessary. Talking to the functional manager may not resolve the problem as the team members are managed by you in your project. [PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Responsibility] (Domain: People, Task 1)

You are helping an organization transform to Agile practices. You are currently developing guidelines regarding forming Agile teams. All of the following would be your recommendations EXCEPT:

Most or all team members should be "I-shaped". Agile teams should be small, collocated, and mostly consist of "T-Shaped" people where possible. [Agile Practice Guide, 1st edition, Pages 39, 42] (Domain: People, Task 6)

Team members in successful Agile teams work to collaborate in various ways. Which of the following is not a valid example of these ways?

Multi-tasking Pairing, swarming, mobbing are valid WIP management and collaboration techniques. Multi-tasking is considered a waste in Agile environments. [Agile Practice Guide, 1st edition, Page 39] (Domain: People, Task 7)

You have recently setup a daily team stand-up. For the first few days, the stand-ups were flowing smoothly, until today when a number of issues have been reported by the team. What should be done next?

Park the issues and create another meeting to solve them. An anti-pattern typically seen in stand-ups is that the team begins to solve problems as they become apparent. Stand-ups are for realizing there are problems - not for solving them. Add the issues to a parking lot, and then create another meeting, which might be right after the stand-up, and solve problems there. [Agile Practice Guide, 1st edition, Page 54] (Domain: People, Task 7)

A Responsibility Assignment Matrix illustrates the connections between the work that needs to be done and the project team members. A RACI chart is a type of Responsibility Assignment matrix in which the names of the roles being documented are:

Responsible, Accountable, Consult, and Inform In a RACI chart, the names of roles are Responsible, Accountable, Consult and Inform. [PMBOK® Guide 7th edition, Page 189] (Domain: People, Task 2)

In projects following Scrum framework, who is responsible for ensuring the Scrum process is upheld and works to ensure the Scrum team adheres to the practices and rules?

Scrum master The scrum master is responsible for ensuring the Scrum process is upheld and works to ensure the Scrum team adheres to the practices and rules as well as coaches the team on removing impediments. [Agile Practice Guide, 1st edition, Page 101] (Domain: People, Task 2)

You are leading a complex financial system upgrade project. The project is very critical for the business and must go live by a certain date in order to meet a government regulation. Any implementation delay might trigger significant penalties imposed on the organization. Your lead developer is delivering late and at low quality. You have noticed that he has often disregarded communications such as emails and skipped meetings in the past. So far this was all under control, but now it is affecting other team members. You are concerned that this could delay the project. What should you do?

Talk to the lead developer in private and try to understand the reasons causing this behavior. The scenario doesn't tell us the actual reason behind the resource's behavior. As the project manager it is your responsibility to uncover the reason before taking any action. As the first step, you need to talk to the resource in person and try to understand the reasons causing this behavior. [PMBOK® Guide 7th edition, Page 168] (Domain: People, Task 1)

A critical resource is on another project team. It is essential that you get his time for your project. You have contacted the resource's team manager several times but have received a poor response. What should you consider doing next?

Try to use management influence to obtain the resource's time. Contacting the manager once again will not help since you have already had a poor response. The best option is to try using management influence to obtain the resource's time for your project. Should all efforts to obtain the resource prove unsuccessful, alternatives include planning for an alternate resource or training another resource. [PMBOK® Guide 7th edition, Page 65] (Domain: People, Task 6)

An organization is currently struggling during its transition from traditional to Agile project management approaches. Teams are still working in silos instead of coming together and forming a cross-functional team. If you are the servant-leader, what should you do first?

Use servant-leadership skills to help the managers understand why Agile needs cross-functional teams. As the first step you need to make the initial effort. Engaging the product owner or an external coach is not recommended as the first step. You should use your servant-leadership skills to help the functional managers understand why Agile needs a cross-functional team. The functional manager can then help you in forming cross-functional teams. [Agile Practice Guide, 1st edition, Page 59] (Domain: People, Task 2)

Your Agile team is collocated except one of the team members who is based at the client location. How should you conduct your daily standups with this constraint?

Use video conferencing technology to accommodate the remote team member. Although it is desirable that all team member are physically present during the daily standups, there are always some constraints that can create impediments. In this case, the remotely located team member should join the meeting using video conferencing technology. [Agile Practice Guide, 1st edition, Page 122] (Domain: People, Task 11)

You have outsourced programming to a company in another country and structural engineering to a company in a different country. The project does not have the budget to bring all the teams together, so you must rely on email, fax, videoconference, and chat to work together. This is an example of:

Virtual Team Any team that does not meet face to face but instead relies on electronic communications is a virtual team. [PMBOK® Guide 7th edition, Page 253] (Domain: People, Task 11)