SIE 457 Exam 1 Review

If the optimistic estimate for an activity is 12 days, and the pessimistic estimate is 18 days, what is the standard deviation for this activity?

1 day

What is the length of the project

13

Activity 1 has a duration of 20 days, activity 2 of 10 days, activity 3 of 5 days and activity 4 of 6 days. What is the minimum total duration between the milestones A and B?

37 days

Suppose you evaluated the best-case, most likely, and worst-case duration estimates for an activity and determined that they were 3 days, 4 days, and 8 days, respectively. Using PERT (three-point estimates) estimation techniques, what would be the expected duration for the activity?

4.5 days

What is the float of activity B

6

Which statement describes best the meaning of the term cost baseline?

A cost baseline is an approved time-phased budget that will be used to measure and monitor cost performance on the project

All of the following are elements in the definition of a project except

A project is composed of unrelated activities

What is a trigger in project risk management?

A warning sign that a previously identified risk might be occurring or has occurred

Start dates in the following network logic diagram are defined as early morning, finish dates are evening. If tasks are scheduled to begin at early start date, what is true?

Activity B has a free float of 10 d

All of the following would be considered examples of significant project risk except?

All are examples of significant potential project risks

The project manager spends a great deal of her time communicating with project stakeholders. Which of the following represent an example of a stakeholder group for her project

All are project stakeholders

Which of the following statements regarding networks is false?

All of the above are false

Which of the following best describes a project stakeholder

All of the above are stakeholders

The objective of failure mode and effects analysis is to:

Anticipate product failures and prevent them from occurring

A project manager made 3-point estimates on a critical path and found the following results. Assuming ±3 sigma precision level for each estimate, what is the standard deviation of the all over path?

Approximately 5.2 days

Your project team is working on a brand new project with leading edge technology. As a result, it is very difficult for your team to give reasonable accurate estimates for how long their activities are going to take in order to be completed. Because of this uncertainty, it would be appropriate for you to require your team members to use what kind of logic when estimating durations?

Beta distribution

Which is not a point used for three-point estimation?

Budget Estimate

A Project Manager is using a network to perform critical path analysis. The network diagram is represented as shown using below. Which of the following represents the critical path:

CDGIR

A project manager tracks the work of team members using a network logic diagram. Which effect will the presence of an actual finish date have on the calculation of float for the finished activity?

Calculating free float and total float is generally not reasonable for finished activites

Which of the following is a common multi-criteria selection model

Checklist Weighted criteria model

Which of these is not an example of a project?

Cleaning the office building each day

A hospital expansion is being planned for a community. As part of the scope of this project, it will be necessary to close down the access routes into the emergency room for major remolding; however, because this is the only hospital for trauma cases within 50 miles, it is not possible to completely shut down the emergency room. The project team will have to find a means to remodel the emergency room while allowing for continuous operations of the unit. This is an example of what?

Constraints

A (__________) is a time-phased budget that project managers use to measure and monitor cost performance

Cost baseline

The essential difference between cost price is?

Cost is the expenses incurred by the project; price is what the customer is charged for the work/product

The WBS, estimates for each work package, and the network diagram are completed. Which of the following would be the NEXT thing for the project manager to do?

Create a preliminary schedule

(_________) is a method of planning and managing projects that emphasizes the resources required to execute project tasks. It is based on methods and algorithms derived from theory of constraints?

Critical Chain Method

A project manager is informed that a limited number of resources are going to be available for his project. He creates a project schedule by adding buffers to the project to protect the target finish date. What type of schedule network analysis is he using?

Critical Chain method

To control the schedule, a project manager is reanalyzing the project to predict project duration. She does this by analyzing the sequence of activities with the least amount of scheduling flexibility. What technique is she using?

Critical Path Method

You need to analyze a rocket engine. Which method is best to be applied for this situation?

DFMEA

Based on the following, which event should you be most concerned about?

Design Flaw

What is the first step in planning a project?

Developing an activity list

If a risk has a 90 percent chance of occurring, and the consequences will be $10,000, what does $9,000 represent?

Expected monetary value

Suppose a project plan had three distinct paths through a network. The first path consisted of activities A (3 days), B (4 days), and C (2 days). The second path consisted of activities D (4 days), E (5 days), and F (5 days). The third path consisted of activities G (2 days), H (3 days) and I (10 days). Which is the critical path?

GHI

What should not be covered by a risk management plan?

Individual risks and potential responses to them

The PMI project management process groups are

Initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing

The project manager wants to make sure that he is proceeding in the right order as he moves to develop a clear scope for his project. During scope definition, what should he be doing?

Involving stakeholders and verifying that they have all provided their input to the process

Which of the following is not true about analogous estimating

It uses bottom-up approach

You are creating your WBS and find that you keep decomposing tasks into smaller and smaller units. How can you tell when you are done?

Keep decomposing tasks until you reach an amount of work that is small enough to reliably estimate required resources and durations.

Learning curved are most likely to be applied in situation where most of the costs are

Labor

When activities can be broken into segments such as in the example below, what method is being employed?

Laddering

You are working on the project of painting of your house. You identify a dependency that the painting of roof should begin only after two days of completion of painting of walls. This is an example of

Lag

Activity slack (also known as float) can be calculated through which of the following means?

Late start (LS)- early start (ES)

You have been asked to make an estimate for a project. The project involves manufacturing 1000 toys. You expect that as the team manufactures some toys, the time to make them will reduce. Which estimation technique are you trying to use?

Learning Curve

Resource leveling can provide

Lower peak demand reduced resource need over the life of the project Reduced fluctuations in resource demand

Which of the following is not a part of the triple constraint in Project Management?

Meeting communication goals

Splitting an activity creates the following situation

More people working on the same activity there are possible startup and shutdown costs a resource may be moved from one activity to another and then back

You have been criticized that certain specifications in your scope statement do not pass the test for SMART objectives. What are SMART objectives?

Objectives that are described using specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and time-related specifications

Which of the following statements regarding PERT times is true?

Optimistic time estimate is an estimate of the minimum time an activity will require. The probable time estimate is calculated as t = (a + 4m + b)/6

A project manager is using weighted average duration estimates to perform schedule network analysis. Which type of mathematical analysis is being used?

PERT

You need to analyze the assembly process of a rocket engine. Which method is best to be applied for this situation?

PFMEA

A professional organization for the project management specialists is the

PMI

What cost estimating technique uses project characteristics in a mathematical model to estimate project costs?

Parametric Modeling

The notion that work fills the time available so why hustle to complete a task when it isn't due until tomorrow is?

Parkinson's Law

Rolling wave planning is

Planning near term work in detail

What two dimensions should you use when evaluating project risks?

Probability and impact

A group of related projects that are managed in a coordinated way that usually include an element of ongoing activity is called a:

Program

There are four projects to be chosen from; Project A has NPV of $32,500, Project B has NPV of $35,000, Project C has NPV of $45,000 and Project D has NPV of $10,000. Which Project should be chosen?

Project C

A rough order of magnitude estimate is made during which project management process group?

Project Initiating

What is organization that controls project managers

Project Management Office

What kind of certification does the Project Management Institute provide?

Project Management Professional (PMP)

You are working as a project manager in a company. You have the highest degree of authority; you are working full-time for your project and you manage the budget of the project. What is the organization structure in your company?

Projectized

You have just been made the Project Manager of the ABC project. You are trying to read the WBS and are unable to understand some of the WBS components. Which should be your first step to understand this?

Refer to the WBS dictionary

All of the following are characteristics of the project EXCEPT:

Repeats itself every month

when would a milestone chart be used instead of a bar (Gantt) chart

Reporting to management

In a software company a large number of simultaneously performed projects utilize the same groups of human and other resources. What is the term commonly used for this situation?

Resource pooling

A RACI chart is a type of

Responsibility assignment matrix

What does the acronym RACI commonly stand for in project management?

Responsible, Accountable, to be Consulted, to be Informed

Todd is working on resource scheduling in preparation for the start of a project. There is a potential problem in the works; however, as the new collective bargaining agreement with the company's union has not been concluded. Todd decides to continue working on the resource schedule in anticipation of a satisfactory settlement. Todd's approach would be an example of which method for dealing with risk?

Retain(Accept) is

The project manager has just met with her team to brainstorm some of the problems that could occur on the upcoming project. Today's session was intended to generate possible issues that could arise and get everyone to start thinking in terms of what they should be looking for once the project kicks off. This meeting would be an example of what element in the risk management process?

Risk identification

Which of the following is a true statement about risks?

Risk identification happens in all the phases of the project

Which of the following is true statement about risks?

Risk identification happens in all the phases of the project

All of the Following are characteristics of the project EXCEPT:

Roles and responsibilities

Cost baseline is usually represented using which curve or line

S-curve

The assessment of the external and internal environments is called a (_______) analysis

SWOT

The chances of a risk event occurring as a project proceeds through its life cycle tends to

Slowly drop

A building contractor is working on a vacation home and is looking over his schedule. He notices that the schedule calls for the foundation footers to be poured and then the rough decking to be installed. In this plan, the decking would be an example of what type of activity?

Successor task

What is the typical role of senior management on a project?

Support project: resolve resource and other conflict

Which of the following is not part of the SWOT analysis?

Tactics

In a matrix organization, which of the following is true?

The functional manager is responsible for employee skills improvement The employee is responsible for his or her own skills improvement

Which is the best definition of the "Critical Chain"?

The longest sequence of dependent events through a project network considering both task and resource dependencies

A project is handled by departments of an organization and expedited by a project coordinator. Which of the following statements is more likely to be true?

The performing organization is a weak matrix

A finish to finish relationship is defined as which of the following?

The predecessor has to finish before the successor can finish

What is the project impact of one-week delay of a task that is on the critical path?

The project will be delayed by one week

which of the following statements is false concerning the financial analysis of projects?

The required rate of return is the discount rate that results in an NPV of zero for the project

Which of the following is the most critical component of the quadruple constraint?

They are all equal importance unless otherwise stated

What is the main role of the functional manager?

To control resources To define business processes

A(__________) is deliverable-oriented grouping of the work involved in a project that defines the total scope of the project

WBS

Which of the following is not true about the WBS report

WBS should focus in on the activities that must be performed in the project and should not focus on the deliverables

A project budget report is showing our project as spending $35,000 against budgeted amount of $40,000. Which of the following is true?

We can't be sure how to project is going

Which of the following would be least important on the risk register?

Who identified the risk

What is the lowest level of decomposition in the works breakdown structure called?

Work package

Funds that are for identified risks that have a low probability of occurring and that decrease as the project progresses are called ______ reserves.

contingency

In which of the five PMI project management process groups is the most time and money usually spent

executing

which relationship model is most commonly used in the precedence diagrams

finish-to-start

which of the following is a benefit of an analogous project estimate?

it gives the project team an understanding of managements expectations

to balance risks, the PM should also consider?

opportunities

A temporary endeavor undertaken to create a new product or service is called a

project

A (_________) is a document that contains results of various risk management assessments, often displayed in a table of spreadsheet format

risk register

Project portfolio management addresses ______ goals of an organization, whereas project management addresses _____ goals.

strategic, tactical

Purchasing insurance is BEST considered an example of risk

transfer