PMI Practice Exam II

A project has a budgeted cost of $120,000. According to the schedule, 15% of the project should have been completed after one month. After a month, only 12% of the project has actually been completed. What is the scheduled performance index (SPI)?

0.8

A developer is complaining about the time spent on daily standups, updating stories, creating tasks, and reviewing dependencies between stories instead of developing code. Other team members support the comment. What should a servant leader do next?

Acknowledge the frustration and emphasize the benefit of each activity.

A project manager is working on a deployment project to replace some equipment that will soon become obsolete. A review of the schedule and cost has revealed that a 5-month delay is likely. How should the project manager address risks from the delay?

Analyze the business impact in order to reprioritize the deliverables.

A project manager does not attend the daily stand-up meetings frequently. After attending one particular meeting, the project manager noticed that the meeting was not productive. What should the project manager do to improve the situation?

Analyze the dynamics of these meetings, remove impediments, and provide feedback.

An organization makes an acquisition of a similar product halfway through the development cycle of a potential product. This might create an overlap in the product portfolio. What should the project manager do next?

Assess the feasibility and viability of the project with the product owner.

While gathering requirements for the project scope, the project manager realizes that some of the stakeholder requirements have a conflict. What should the project manager do to define a clear scope?

Assist affected stakeholders in reaching consensus.

A project manager is required to obtain approval for requirements before proceeding to the delivery stage. The project manager realizes that the initial estimates were unrealistic and the project will take much longer to complete. What should the project manager do to mitigate the problem?

Break down and re-prioritize the project deliverables to allow delivery in incremental releases.

In the most recent sprint review meeting, the client announced that they need to implement two of the five modules committed for the project in a few weeks. What should the team do?

Conduct a release plan meeting.

A project manager realizes that some newly hired team members have not been as productive as hoped, which is putting the project at risk. What should the project manager do to resolve this issue?

Conduct job shadowing within the project team.

A member of a development project team informs the project manager that the operating system is not going to be installed on time due to a late upgrade by the supplier. What should the project manager do first?

Determine the impact of the situation.

A project manager is working on a nationwide systems project that will affect business operations. Training is required to ensure everybody can use the new system. What should the project manager do first to address this concern?

Develop and schedule an online training program.

An extremely talented and results-oriented team member is suddenly struggling with a personal problem. Due to this, there is a change in the team member's behavior, and it starts to affect the project deliverables as well as the morale of other team members. What should the project manager do?

Empathize to help the team member overcome their problem.

The project scope statement is approved by the project sponsor. The team members would like to modify the work breakdown structure (WBS) without changing the scope and send a request to the project manager. What should the project manager do with this request?

Empower the team to make the decisions, then inform the sponsor.

An agile project is in the first of six iterations. The team is located globally, so the meetings are in a virtual environment. After the fifth daily meeting, the project manager realize that not all members are actively participating. What should the project manager do?

Engage and guide the team to encourage all members to participate.

A project manager has been engaged by a managing director to transform the project management office (PMO) from a waterfall structure focused on software development to an agile PMO. The manager of the PMO has been particularly resistant to the change. Upon investigation, the project manager realizes that the manager's lack of agile knowledge may make them seem incompetent in front of their team of project managers and thus will not support the transformation. How should the project manager proceed?

Implement a training program on agile for all staff to ensure there is congruency of learning for everyone.

A project manager has just taken over an ongoing project from another project manager. During a review of the project management plan, the project manager realizes that the cost variance and schedule variance are largely negative. Several issues reported on the project have not been resolved, vendors have not been paid for work done, and mitigation of secondary risks is quickly depleting the budget. Which two actions should have been done to avoid this situation? (Choose two)

Implement clear assumptions in the project charter Add a contingency budget to the project charter Identify high-level risks and responses in the project planning phase Identify project handoff procedures Ensure that the project governance controls were approved and implemented

A project manager is beginning a new financial software project. The regulations for compliance are clear, but the requirements are not. The company is in a very competitive environment, so the customer needs results as soon as possible. Which project life cycle should the project manager choose for this project?

Incremental

A newly hired project manager is assigned to a school construction project. The school serves students from surrounding neighborhoods and must be completely energy sufficient. The project manager must provide a final report. How can the project manager show that business value was delivered?

Indicate that the project was delivered on time and within the budget.

An organizational transformation project has two workstreams running in parallel between corporate headquarters and an overseas office. Before kick-off, the project manager is scheduled to meet the overseas office leader. What should be the focus of the meeting?

Inform the overseas office leader of the business' strategic value, the key deliverables, and their expected involvement.

During a progress meeting, the project team learns that an identified risk materialized. The project manager decides to execute the risk response plan, but the contingency reserve does not cover the total budget for that plan. What should the project manager do?

Issue a change request to modify the scope, cost, and schedule baselines to support the new plan.

During a project review meeting, an end user reports that the personal computers supplied for testing are experiencing performance degradation. Which three actions should the project manager take? (Choose three)

Log the issue reported. Implement a resolution of the issue. Assign ownership for the issue. Implement a resolution of the issue. Monitor the issue continually until closure.

A project manager has been assigned to an important project with stakeholders who have different expectations for the project. Some stakeholders also have a high degree of influence on the project. How should the project manager handle this situation?

Manage the stakeholders carefully and apply stakeholder expectations without impacting the project objectives.

Team members are transferred from a predictive project to a newly formed agile team. The new team members are complaining on an internal project team chat channel about additional training they are required to complete. What should the project manager do?

Meet privately with the team members who are complaining to address their concerns.

During the execution of repair work, the root cause of the damage was discovered to be failures that occurred during the construction phase. The same contractor who performed the construction work is performing the repairs. Because of this, the CEO wants to negotiate with the contractor for a reduced price. What should the project manager do?

Negotiate the repair work with the contractor based on a shared-risk-reward relationship.

A new project has a project team that is divided between onsite and offshore locations. Project manager observed a rising conflict between the two parts of the team during project initiation. What should project manager do?

Organize a face-to-face meeting during project kick-off.

A project manager has developed a schedule for a project involving various departments. The project manager met with each team member to develop a work breakdown structure (WBS). However, after the WBS was finalized, the project manager discovers that some tasks are redundant. What should the project manager have done to avoid this issue?

Organized group sessions for all team members to review the WBS together.

Part of the scope has already been delivered on a project. Unclear requirements on some of the remaining scope may have an impact on the scheduled completion. The sponsor still wants the project to meet the original deadline. How should the project manager approach the issue?

Prioritize the most important features while clarifying the unclear requirements.

A project manager is experiencing issues with the functional manager of a project team member. The functional manager has given the team member another assignment and has told the team member that the previous project should be a lower priority. What should the project manager do?

Refer the functional manager to the project charter.

One day prior to starting a task, the technical lead proposed a new implementation approach that can reduce the schedule by 1 week. However, if the approach does not work, the project will be delayed by 3 days. What should the project manager do next?

Refer to the network diagram to determine the float for this task.

Some of the project's materials have been ordered from overseas. The project team has concerns that the materials may not reach the site on time due to a customs clearance delay that will affect the critical path. How should the project manager handle this concern?

Revisit the risk register and implement the respective risk response.

A project manager has just received news that a new regulation has been adopted and the expectation is that that the project will be delivered compliant with this new regulation. This was previously documented as a risk item with a low probability and a moderate impact. What should the project manager do to address the issue?

Revisit the risk register and update the rating and response.

During project execution, a project manager is informed that critical resources will soon be removed from the project. What should the project manager do?

Schedule a meeting to keep the stakeholders informed.

Critical project equipment is being produced by an overseas vendor. A quality survey revealed noncompliance with some of the project specifications. What should the project manager do next?

Schedule regular meetings with the vendor to personally control this situation.

A project team member suddenly approaches the project manager and asks to resign from the project. The team member is upset because of poor treatment and consistent complaints from the technical leader. The team member explains that they are no longer willing to tolerate this treatment from the technical leader. The project manager has never had quality issues with the team member. How should the project manager handle this situation?

Speak with the team member and technical leader to analyze the conflict and resolve it through mediation.

A company has decided to utilize an international virtual team due to a lack of locally skilled resources. What can the project manager do to build an effective project communications management plan?

Study the impact of cultural differences on communication.

A project manager is working on a project to modernize a bank's information technology (IT) infrastructure. The project manager recently received approval of the project's change management plan from the project sponsor. The project sponsor now requests that the project manager implement a new piece of technology in the solution. What should the project manager do next?

Submit a change request to the change control board (CCB).

An organization is adopting an agile approach to fulfill their customer's requirements within a shorter time period and with better quality. Prior to that, the organization worked with specialized resources and project managers who were assigned to the project for a fixed amount of time. What should the organization change to better adopt the agile approach for resource planning?

The agile team should consist of generalists and specialists who continuously learn and improve throughout the project duration.

A company is implementing Agile. Which action should the project manager take to ensure they are acting as a servant leader?

Understand the bottlenecks and support the team to remove them.

A customer is performing a weekly visit to a project site to inspect the final stage of product development. The quality manager alerts the project manager that the customer has been very unprofessional and reprimanded the team members during previous weekly visits. What should the project manager do to address this incident?

Understand the situation by speaking with the team members and the customer.

During a project closing review meeting, the Project Manager notes that a software development task took longer to complete than was planned. Which action should the Project Manager take for continuous project improvement?

Update the performance data in the lessons learned register.

A project team realizes that the product's architecture will not support the growing number of users. What should the project manager do?

Use the next retrospective session to evaluate the problem with the team and prioritize the solution on the product backlog.

A project team member informs the project manager that all items are complete and the team is ready to move on to the next iteration. The project manager reviews the iteration board and notices that there are incomplete items. The iteration ends today. What should the project manager have done to ensure that all of the work for the iteration was done on time?

Validated the iteration backlog items using the definition of done (DoD)

A dedicated team member is disappointed in the performance increment within the team and raises this concern with the project manager. How should the project manager handle this situation?

Verify the key performance indicators (KPIs).

A new project has been assigned to an existing agile team. The previous project the team worked on was so successful that a senior stakeholder is requesting that the team use the same governance used in the previous project. What should the project manager do next?

Work with senior managers to adapt existing governance.

The project teams are having difficulties coordinating their tasks due to several constraints and dependencies. The project management office (PMO) suggests a monthly project report be distributed to stakeholders. However, the customer is concerned about not knowing the progress and what is holding up the project. What three solutions can the project manager use to resolve this situation? (Choose three)

Add a daily meeting to review project status and impediments. Share missing performance information in the monthly status meeting. Add a daily or weekly project status report that includes dependencies. Adapt a project status report to include missing information. Ask vendors to provide a monthly status report for the customer.

An agile team is developing a product that has no room for additional scope due to budget constraints. The customer is requesting a new independent feature be added to the solution in development. What should be the project manager's next step?

Add the new feature to the product backlog.

During a daily meeting, a team member raises a concern about the timeframe planned for the deliverable prototype due to the complexity of the requirements. What two actions should the project manager take to keep the project within the timeframe? (Choose two)

Analyze the impact of handling the prototype with a predictive approach. Document the impact of an extended timeline in the issue log. Utilize an agile approach by reviewing the backlog priorities with the stakeholders. Modify the timeframe to add an additional iteration cycle. Review the risk with the stakeholders and explore simplifying the requirements.

During a standup meeting, team members of a software development team discovered that one of the developers is struggling to complete work due to a lack of experience with test automation. The team member is worried that this might have an impact on achieving the sprint goal. A quality assurance engineer on the team has automation testing experience and becomes aware of the problem but is busy preparing a presentation to new employees. What action would increase the chances of achieving the sprint goal?

Ask the engineer to shift their work to support the developer as soon as possible.

An email from a project manager to a team member is accidentally distributed to the entire global project team. It contains harsh feedback on a recent quality incident, which could have been avoided by closer attention to detail. What should the project manager do next?

Ask the team to attend a virtual meeting and discuss the email as a group.

On an agile project, a team member has been taking smaller, easier user stories from the backlog, and not necessarily those with the highest priority. How should this be addressed?

Meet with the team member to understand the reason and tailor the workload approach, if required.

A company has hired a project manager to implement an adaptive project framework. Project has made some progress, but the team is frustrated because client does not provide feedback or participate in defining acceptance criteria. What could have caused this situation?

Client does not understand the importance of their involvement.

An experienced project manager joins an ongoing project's team and wants to estimate the amount of time required to tackle a number of complex tasks. The team uses a Kanban board but is open to new ideas. The project manager suggests using story points. What is the first thing the team should do before adopting this new approach?

Convert all work in progress limits to story points.

A stakeholder complains that one of the product's components is not easy to use. What should be the immediate next step for the project manager?

Check if the component meets the design and performance specifications as per the acceptance criteria.

The leadership team of a company asked a project manager about the status update of the latest iteration of a project. The project manager directed the leadership team to the project folder. The leadership team informed the project manager that a specific piece of information was not found. What should the project manager have done to avoid this situation?

Check the project folder to make sure that everything is updated before sharing the folder with the leadership team.

A new team member is taking over the tasks for a team member who is going on leave. During the transition, the new team member thinks that several parts of the new application cannot be tested yet, despite sign-off by the outgoing team member. What should the project manager do to address this concern?

Check the project readiness and direct the new team member to the shared project folder with the latest documentation.

During a retrospective meeting, some team members strongly disagree with how the product owner and scrum master have handled some issues related to the scope of the last cycle. What should the project manager do first?

Collect all available information from the team and address the problem.

Halfway through implementation, the project cosponsor, who is contributing a significant amount of capital into the project, informs the project team of an additional feature to the project deliverable. What should the project manager do?

Collect the cosponsor's requirements and perform the integrated change control process.

A project can gain downstream marketing benefits if additional equipment is included in the project scope. However, this equipment is still in an early development phase and will not be ready to meet the project timelines. A member of the project steering committee is in favor of its inclusion. How should the project manager proceed?

Conduct a survey among steering committee members to assess their individual project requirements for a consensus decision.

During the design phase, a project manager realizes that the project will benefit from using adaptive tools. The effectiveness of this approach has been proven in past projects inside the organization. What should the project manager do first?

Confirm team capabilities before introducing adaptive tools and artifacts to the project.

A project manager conducted an analysis with relevant stakeholders to validate project alignment with organizational strategy and expected business value. Some of the key stakeholders missed the analysis session, and hence, their input was not factored in. What is the main impact of these absences on the project?

Conflict in subsequent phases of the project may result.

A project manager is leading a new implementation project with a global project team. As team members are in different geographical locations and time zones, the project manager has to decide on the most effective team engagement strategy. What is the first action the project manager should take?

Develop a communications management plan.

The research and development team is planning to build a new facility that will focus on improving existing products that the organization has developed. It will be a multiyear initiative. What should the project manager do to plan for this?

Develop a resource management plan to cover resources and contingency planning.

A project manager has been assigned to a project that is currently late and over budget. The project uses a predictive approach integrated with agile iterations for the most critical part of the scope. During the project assessment, the project manager notices that the team is afraid of making mistakes and is seeking individual recognition, while lacking accountability. How should the project manager improve productivity?

Enable collaboration, create common goals, and celebrate group achievements, while providing group rewards.

In an ongoing project, performance is continuously evaluated to determine benefits. Which two actions should the project manager do at the beginning of the project? (Choose two)

Ensure approval of the performance parameters with the stakeholders. Hold regular meetings with all of the stakeholders. Agree on the requirements for measurement tracking. Review the project administration on a regular basis. Simulate and predict the performance parameters for key stakeholders.

A project team member repeatedly requests more granular details on a work package than the Gantt chart indicates. The other project team members feel that the current Gantt chart is sufficiently detailed. What should a project manager do to address this situation?

Ensure that the team member understands the granular information retreival process.

During project execution, the project sponsor decides to replace a subject matter expert (SME) on the project. What should the project manager do?

Ensure there is sufficient knowledge transfer between the SME and their replacement.

A project manager is assigned to a new project with a team that the project manager knows well and has worked with a number of projects. The team's average velocity is eight points per sprint. Another team has some time between projects and assists the team with sizing stories. The table below shows the estimated story points for each of the new features that will be built. The business wants to confirm a delivery date as soon as possible. FeaturePoints 1: 24 2: 13 3: 8 4: 21 5: 13 Which two actions should the project manager take? (Choose two)

Explain to the business that the team will need 10 sprints to deliver the features. Inform the business that the team that will be doing the work needs to estimate the feature sizes. Set up a meeting between both project teams to understand how their estimation of story sizes works. Explain to the team that the sizing was already done and they will need to deliver the project in 10 sprints. Discuss the business request with the team and determine a solution to plan for a five-sprint schedule.

During a multidisciplinary project, a project manager learns that there are many conflicts about design among team members from different disciplines. What should the project manager do to ensure smooth delivery of the project?

Facilitate team discussions to achieve the desired results.

A new project manager joins an organization that has never had formal project management processes. Some team members refuse to participate in basic tasks such as taking ownership of action items at meetings. What should the project manager do?

Host a meeting with the team focused on collaborative problem solving to develop an approach to accomplishing project tasks.

A project is halfway complete, and despite a good schedule performance index (SPI), there are several quality issues that have been identified by the customer. The project manager wants the team to work together to improve customer satisfaction and quickly resolve the issues, but some team members feel they are unable to adequately engage the customer. How can the project manager mentor the team for a successful customer engagement?

Identify team diversity and assess members' personalities, providing feedback as needed.

A project manager is beginning a new project and is starting to form the project team. The project manager has not worked with anyone from this team previously, and most of the team members do not know each other. Some of the team members are located in different countries. Which two actions should the project manager take to help the team work more closely together? (Choose two)

Identify the cultural differences and potential conflict areas to mitigate these going forward. Allocate a budget for the team members to temporarily colocate for the duration of the project. Arrange virtual team-building sessions that allow team members to get to know each other. Select team members who have previously worked together to be allocated to the project. Identify experienced team members to provide mentoring for the less experienced team members.

A 5-year highway construction project is in its third year of execution. The project manager received a complaint from an activist group in the neighborhood. What should the project manager have done to avoid this issue?

Identify the neighborhood representatives in the communications management plan.

A non-colocated project team just finished a sprint with complex tasks ahead of schedule. During the retrospective, which often end early for this team, a new member of the team interrupts and asks everyone to explain their roles and what they are planning on working on for the next sprint. What should the project manager do?

Inform the team member that this would be best handled in another meeting.

During project closure, the team considers that the final sprint retrospective is not necessary because there are no remaining sprints. What could be a possible helpful outcome of holding this sprint retrospective?

Information that could be useful for future projects

A client has contracted a company to manage a large project in an agile environment with many subcontractors. The client is giving direct orders to the subcontractors, rather than to the contractor's project manager. This has created conflict within the team. What should the project manager do to prevent this situation from occurring again?

Invite the client to the team planning meeting.

During a kick-off meeting with the project sponsor and various project members, it became clear that it was not necessary for some participants to be present. In addition, one required expert was not aware of the meeting and was not present at the meeting. What should the project manager have done to prevent this from happening?

Managed stakeholder engagement by involving the stakeholders in the appropriate phases of the project.

A key member of a project team publicly asserts that another team member has been speaking negatively about them. The team member threatens to quit their job if the project manager does not take immediate action to address the conflict. What should the project manager do first?

Meet with the accused team member to understand their point of view.

The development of a final project schedule is being delayed by the inability to negotiate an agreement with one of the vendors needed for successful project delivery. What should the project manager do?

Meet with the vendor to identify an appropriate path forward; if not possible identify another vendor that can complete the project within acceptable terms.

During a software development project, the team realizes that several features failed to comply with quality requirements. After receiving instructions to fix the issues, one team member becomes really frustrated, claiming that unclear requirements are causing the issues. Other team members argue that negligent testing is the real cause of these issues. The testers blame poor coding quality. What should the project manager do?

Perform a quality review in each stage of the development life cycle to identify the reason for quality issues.

A project manager is assigned to take over an ongoing project. During the quality review, it is found that 40% of the deliverables have defects and require rework, with an expected worsening trend. What should be the project manager's first step?

Perform a root cause analysis.

A project team is in sprint 13 of a fourteen-sprint project. The project team placed a game-changing feature on the backlog for the next release that closely resembles a feature that a competitor is now launching. The product owner is insisting this game-changing feature be incorporated in the current release. What should be the next step for the project manager?

Perform the required assessments to understand the change and raise a change request with the change control board (CCB).

A new project manager is assigned to an ongoing agile project. The project is now starting its second 4-week iteration cycle. The project manager finds there are significant differences of opinion within the project team, leading to major setbacks for the project. What should the project manager do in order to help overcome differences and bring the project back on track?

Promote conversation among team members in upcoming review meetings to help solve the problem.

A project manager is working on a global project with team members in several different countries. To manage communications, the project manager plans to hold virtual meetings and on-site visits once a month. What should the project manager do next while working with this team?

Propose and establish a team charter with the rules and principles to be followed.

As agreed at the start of a predictive project, all outgoing information should be shared beforehand with the project manager. During the project, one of the team leaders communicated directly with the sponsor, bypassing the project manager. As a result, unfiltered information was conveyed to the sponsor, and important information from the team was not being shared with the project manager. What should the project manager do next?

Remind the team leader to always inform the project manager of any issues first.

A project team is unexpectedly audited. Several non-conformances are identified during the audit. Which three actions could the project manager have taken to prevent this situation? (Choose three)

Requested advance notification of the audit Anticipated nonconformance items Requested that the team prepare for a possible audit Ensured that the auditors are experienced Rejected the audit request

The tables show the requirements for an agile project with the anticipated return on investment (ROI) and identified project risks, along with the analysis details. What should be the priority order in the product backlog?

Requirement 3, Requirement 1, Risk 3, Requirement 2, Risk 1, Risk 2

A virtual team is midway through a sprint of a complex task and is ahead of schedule. During the daily standup, which often tends to end early, a new team member interrupts and asks everyone to define their role and what they worked on prior to this sprint. How should project manager handle this situation?

Respectfully inform the team member that this would be best taken care of in another meeting.

An agile project manager is running a Kanban project but needs a tool to assess task completion roadblocks for an upcoming major milestone. What should the project manager do?

Review the blocked items with the team during standup meetings.

While closing a project, the client finds some defects in the deliverable. What should the project manager do next?

Review the output against the acceptance criteria.

During the execution of a project in a remote area, team members complain about the way one team member behaves after work. What should the project manager do to solve this problem?

Review the team norms and discuss this with the team.

Due to economic implications, a company announces imminent layoffs. A project is nearing delivery, and the team is worried that they might lose their jobs. The morale of the team is very low, and the project manager is experiencing delivery delays from the team. What should the project manager do to address team morale?

Schedule one-on-one sessions with each team member to reassure them of their value to the company.

A software delivery team at a large bank is frustrated by the documentation requirements put in place by the governance department in charge of their change control board (CCB). The project manager approaches the governance department and requests that they work together to reduce the amount of paperwork required from the delivery team, explaining that it slows them down and adds overhead costs. This is an example of what kind of leadership?

Servant leadership

A client's project sponsor assigns a contact person to the project manager. Additional intermediate reports and details are being asked by the contact person increasing the overhead of preparing the progress reports. Yet the client's project sponsor complains of non-receipt of progress reports during a monthly status meeting. What should the project manager do to address this situation?

Set up a review meeting with the client's project sponsor and contact person to address the communication gaps.

A project is in execution. The project manager was just reassigned to another strategic project, and the project was handed off to a new project manager. The project is currently facing issues with the quality and scheduling of some of the deliverables. What should the new project manager review first?

Stakeholder register

A team member with sufficient experience and knowledge informs the project manager about a conflict with another team member and asks for advice and help. What should the project manager do?

The project manager discusses the issue with the team members, and they decide on the solution together.

A project team is working on a complex technology project. A competitor introduces a product with a new feature, forcing the team to make changes to keep their product from becoming obsolete. The team uses software that is outdated and cannot accommodate the development of the new feature. As a result, the team must utilize new-to-market software. The team is eager to get started, but the project manager realizes that the team does not have any experience with the new software. What should the project manager do to address this knowledge gap?

Train the team to use the new software.

A critical project is in progress and is expected to bring a good monetary return for the firm. The firm is currently facing a cost overrun and needs liquidity to overcome the financial crisis. The ongoing project needs to be reviewed by senior management to determine whether it aligns with the organizational objectives or not. Which tool should the project manager use to prepare a report for management?

Trend analysis

A project manager is assigned to a new project. The requirements are still evolving, but there is a need to deliver business value quickly. What approach should the project manager take in this situation?

Use a product backlog and complete the highest priority requirements first.

A project manager has been assigned to a new, multimillion-dollar project that is similar to a project the company executed three years ago. What should the project manager do to create a reliable cost estimate?

Use the actual cost of the previous project as a reference and compute an estimated cost for each task and roll up.

Project team members inform their project manager of a challenge they are facing. This challenge will likely impact project timelines. What should the project manager do next?

Work with the team members to understand and evaluate the challenge's impact on the overall project.