Project management final

The formula for computing the cost/time slope for each activity that can be crashed is ________.

(Crash cost - normal cost) / (crash time - normal time)

In earned value analysis, the 0 - 100 percent rule allows ________.

0 percent credit when work begins and 100 percent credit at completion of the activity

The critical activities in each real world projects typically constitute no more than _% of total activities in the project

10

During the initiation project stage, project audits/evaluations can provide significant value if the audit takes place early -- prior to ________% completion of the initial planning stage

25 percent

Task F has duration of 10 days and an early start date of 20 days. Based on the given data, determine the early finish date for task F.

30 days

In earned value analysis, the 50-50 estimate assumes that ________.

50 percent is earned when the task begins and 50 percent is earned at completion

The usual purpose of the ________ scheduling heuristic is to delay cash outflows as long as possible.

ALAP

The ________ heuristic provides a general solution for critical path and time. It is usually the default rule for a schedule.

ASAP

When a decision is made to terminate a project by extinction, the most noticeable event is that ________.

All activity on the substance of the project ceases

The points between the extreme points of the relationship between time use and resource use represent ________.

Alternatives for trade-offs between time and resources

The project audit covers ________.

Any matter of importance to management

Most studies have shown that the factors associated with project success or failure ________ the various types of projects.

Are different across different industries and

The criteria and data collection procedures used during monitoring are usually set up for the life of the project. But ________ may not be constant over the project's life because they can be changed by the parent organization, the client, or the community.

Audit checks

Secondary uses for monitoring include ________.

Auditing, learning from experience, and reporting progress and status

The key feature of cybernetic control systems is ________.

Automatic operation

In the audit report, negative comments about individuals or groups associated with the project should be ________.

Avoided

________ is defined as a standard for performance, commonly established early on for later comparisons

Baseline

When using the beta distribution, the denominator of the formula for standard deviation should ________.

Be adjusted by converting the range into the correct z-score value

If deterministic time estimates are used, and if project deadlines are firm, there is a high likelihood that it will ________.

Be necessary to crash the last few activities of most projects

Monitoring, as an activity, should be kept distinct from ________, which uses data supplied by monitoring to bring actual performance into approximate congruence with planned performance.

Controlling

The stewardship of human resources requires ________ the growth and development of people.

Controlling and maintaining

If CPI = 1.05, then ________ is favorable

Cost variance

The ________ dimension of project success includes the obvious factors of meeting the project's technical and operational specifications. It also includes factors relating to loyalty and repurchase.

Customer impact/satisfaction

For each factor to be measured during monitoring; performance criteria, standards, and ________ must be established.

Data collection procedures

In a statistical distribution, when an observation's value moves closer to the distribution's mean, the z-score value will

Decrease

Identification of the ancillary goals of a project requires ________ because; for the most part the goals were not overtly identified.

Deductive reasoning

In termination by integration, project assets are ________.

Distributed among the existing elements of the parent organization

The accumulation, storage, and maintenance of auditable data are important cost elements. Such storage may be critically important in meeting the legal test of ________.

Due diligence

If a date-constrained project is scheduled from the ending date constraint using the ALAP heuristic, the following effect will be observed in the network..

Each activity will have zero slack and be located on the critical path

Monitoring, as an activity, should be kept distinct from ________, which is the process of making judgments about the quality and effectiveness of project performance.

Evaluation

The ________ schedule compression technique overlaps the design and build phases of a project to expedite a project.

Fast-tracking

A precedence relationship where the completion of a successor activity depends on the completion of a predecessor activity is called a __________ dependency.

Finish to finish

During the implementation of project termination, the termination manager should ensure that ________.

Formal acceptance of the project is acknowledged by the client

The ________ dimension of project success includes factors relating to opening a new market, developing a new line of products or services. Alternatively, if an internal project, success factors include developing new technologies, skills, or competencies.

Future potential

Most control systems used in project management today fall into this category of control system.

Go/no-go control

The most common mistake made when monitoring data is to gather information that is clearly related to project performance but ________.

Has little or no probability of changing significantly between collection periods

Which of the following is NOT a common difficulty in the design of project reports

Having too many interface modules

The ________ approach to constrained resource scheduling problems is the only feasible method of attacking large, nonlinear, complex problems that tend to occur in the real world of project

Heuristic

The two fundamental approaches to constrained allocation problems are ________.

Heuristic approaches and optimization models

The first step in setting up a monitoring system is to ________.

Identify the key factors to be controlled

According to the authors, in the planning -- monitoring -- controlling cycle, the directions of the flows indicate that ________.

Information flows from the bottom to the top and authority flows from the top to the bottom

__________ is when individuals are overwhelmed with too many reports, too much detail, and too much data

Information overload

In general, the problems of integration are ________ to the level of experience that the parent organization has had with the technology being integrated and to the successful integration of other projects, regardless of technology

Inversely proportional

For audits made late in the project's life, ________ are major matters of interest.

Management issues

The methods to find an optimal solution to the constrained resource scheduling problem fall into two categories. They are ________.

Mathematical programming and enumeration

Two of the most common limits on the depth of an investigation and level of detail presented in an audit report are ________.

Money and time

In monitoring systems, bias finding and correcting activities are worthwhile

Only if data with less or no bias are required

Go/no-go controls operate ________.

Only when and if the controller uses them

The 2004 PMBOK recognizes the importance of what is called OPA. What does OPA stand for?

Organizational Process Assets

The Gantt chart is intended to monitor the detailed progress of work, whereas the master schedule contains only major tasks and is oriented toward ________.

Overall project management rather than precise control of detailed work

__________ was developed by the U.S. Navy while the __________ was developed by __________.

PERT, CPM, DuPont

Most heuristic solution methods start with the ________ and analyze resource usage period by period, resource by resource.

PERT/CPM schedule

Control is focused on ________ elements of a project.

Performance, cost, and time

Economically speaking, crashing a project creates a technology change in the ________ for an activity.

Production function

________, as one of the four dimensions of project success, is focused on meeting both the budget and schedule established in the project plan.

Project efficiency

________ appraises the progress and performance of a project compared to that project's planned progress and performance, or compared to the progress and performance of other, similar projects.

Project evaluation

During the implementation of project termination, if personnel performance evaluations are required, they should be prepared by the ________.

Project manager or the immediate supervisor of each individual team member

In a cybernetic control system using a negative feedback loop, the speed or force with which the control operates is, in general, ________ to the size of the deviation from standard.

Proportional

The critical ratio control chart uses a ratio made up of two parts -- the ratio of actual progress to scheduled progress, and the ________.

Ratio of budgeted cost to actual cost

When performing control, project managers need to be attentive to ________.

Regulation and conservation equally

In essence, the law of ________ dictates that a controller must be able to take a counteraction for every action the system can take in order to achieve total control over the system.

Requisite variety

n application, PERT has primarily been used for ________ projects.

Research and development

The principal reason why a project manager is surprised by resource constraints on a project is because the project manager failed to include ________ in risk identification activities.

Resource availability

The standard practice with PERT/CPM is to estimate activity times under the assumption of ________.

Resource loadings that are normal

Identify the item that is not one of the three types of control processes described by the authors.

Robotic control

In their 2005 paper Hussain and Wearne reported the results of a survey of over 1000 project managers who were asked to identify the "greatest problem of project management". Which of the following was NOT one of the top three responses?

Scope change issues

In order to gain user acceptance, the control system should appear to be ________.

Sensible

In addition to being easy to maintain, a good control system will ________ if it goes out of order.

Signal the overall controller

In an AON diagram, when there are multiple activities without predecessors and there are multiple activities having no successors, ________ are used to eliminate the potential for hanging tasks in the network.

Start and stop nodes

STWP / ATWP = ________.

TPI

Audits done early in the project lifecycle are often focused on ________.

Technical issues

The termination stage of the project rarely has much impact on ________.

Technical success or failure of the project

When using heuristic solutions to build a schedule, ________ will always take precedence.

Technological necessities

n a network, an activity can be shown in one of three conditions. Identify the statement that does not correctly describe one of the three possible conditions.

The activity may have neither a predecessor nor a successor

Because project milestones do not occur at periodic intervals, go/no-go controls should be linked to ________; not simply to the calendar.

The actual plans and to the occurrence of real events

In earned value analysis, if the cost variance is ($10,000), ________.

The cost overrun is unfavorable

The shortest time in which the entire network can be completed is referred to as ________.

The critical time of the network

While performing a forward pass calculation to determine the critical path of a network, when multiple paths converge into a successor activity, the value carried forward to the early start of the successor activity is ________.

The largest early finish of the successor's immediate predecessors

The calculation of the standard deviation for the beta distribution is based on the assumption that ________.

The range is approximately equal to six standard deviations

While performing a backward pass calculation for a network, when multiple paths converge into a predecessor activity, the value carried backward to the late finish of the predecessor activity is

The smallest late start of the predecessor's immediate successors

Physical asset control requires control of the ________ and is concerned with asset maintenance, whether preventative or corrective.

The use of physical assets

The following statement is a major disadvantage of third-order cybernetic control systems.

Their human elements lack predictability and reliability

According to the authors, the key items to be planned, monitored, and controlled are ________.

Time, cost, and performance

In termination by addition, project assets are ________.

Transferred from the dying project to the newly born division

In CPM, ________ are specified.

Two activity times and two costs

When crashing a project, our first task is to develop __________.

a table or graph of the cost of a project as a function of the project's possible completion dates

the authors recommend that reports to senior management appear to be uniquely helpful when these reports are made _______.

at project phase gates

The ________ dimension of project success is measured primarily in terms of the level of commercial success and market share. For internal projects, however, the factors might include such measures as yields, cycle times, processing steps, quality, and so on.

business/direct success

a person with organizational clout who takes on personal responsibility for the successful completion of a project for the organization is referred to as a(n) _______.

champion

A(n) __________ measures performance over time, showing how it changes compared to a desired mean and upper and lower limits.

control chart

All issues that the auditor feels require close monitoring by senior management should be included in this section of an audit report.

critical management issues

Most commercially available project management software applications use the ________ type of network

d) AON

The variance of a population is a measure of the population's __________

dispersion

In some situations, 2 activities are scheduled to be carried out using the same scarce resource. If the supply of the scarce resource is not sufficient, then what is given priority immediately lengthens the other activity's path but not its actual ___.

duration

Identification of the direct goals of a project requires ________.

eading of the project proposal and close examination of project selection documentation

In the AOA network, circles depict

events

The difference between the late start and early start for an activity is called its

float

Which of the following is not one of the top three project success factors, from a project manager's perspective?

future potential

The use of PERT (ADM) has declined sharply in recent years because a large majority of project management software __________.

generate CPM networks

It is important to good project management to be meticulously __________ in estimating the time required to complete each of the various tasks included in the project.

honest

A large proportion of all data collected takes one of the following forms EXCEPT

individual perceptions

Reports for __________ have a need for detailed information about individual tasks and the factors affecting such tasks.

lower-level personnel

The authors recommend preparing a schedule for each

major task level in the WBS

Studies have shown that the __________ scheduling heuristic method usually results in the minimum amount of project schedule slippage, best utilization of facilities, and minimum total system occupancy time.

minimum slack first

With few exceptions, the control of projects is always exercised through _______.

people

The ________process controls the project at various points in the life cycle to make sure that the project remains on course. This is opposed to waiting until the project is completed and then finding out it doesn't meet the objectives of the organization.

phased-gate

The tasks that logically precede a particular task in time are referred to as __________.

predecessors

Physical asset control is concerned with asset maintenance, whether __________.

preventive or corrective

An evaluation of the likely outcomes of a policy and their probability of occurrence, usually conducted to compare two or more scenarios or policies is known as __________

risk analysis

the two fundamental objectives of control are the regulation of results and the ______.

stewardship of organizational assets

Measuring characteristics such as "quality of team member cooperation" and "morale of team members" generally takes the form of __________characterizations

verbal