Project Management Midterm 2
Your team is new to agile, and it's taking them some time to learn how stand-ups work. In the last meeting, a team member asked something and you had to explain that this wasn't a question for the stand-up. What did they ask?
B. Are there any other issues we need to discuss this morning?
An old application system is to be rewritten using a database in the cloud, new middleware for system interfaces, and a new security platform. All of these technologies are new to the team. The team will be using an agile approach. What should the project manager recommend?
A. Use the first few iterations to create a proof of concept in each new technology
When would it be worthwhile for your agile team to take the time to develop a set of personas for the project?
A. When they want to stay focused on what the users really need.
It's Monday morning, and you just found out that the lead developer on your agile team has broken his leg and will be out for six weeks. The team is in the middle of a two-week iteration that ends in four days, on Thursday. What should you do?
B. Ask the team how much of the iteration plan can be completed by Thursday.
On an agile project, who is responsible for prioritizing the product backlog and keeping those priorities updated?
B. The product owner or customer
Your agile development team can't agree on the best approach to building the next product increment. As the project manager, how can you help them resolve this debate and move forward?
C. Suggest that they take a vote and proceed with the winning approach.
After a product visioning session and the drafting of a product roadmap, the project manager submits an estimated budget for her agile project. Why is she confident that her budget is accurate?
A stable agile team has been selected and a six-month timebox has been agreed to.
What's the best way for your agile team share their progress with other project stakeholders?
B. Information radiators
Your team wants to use a hybrid-agile approach to their high risk project because:
C. Risk and value are inversely related.
Which approach would be a hybrid of agile and traditional methods?
D. Estimating and planning in story points while using traditional vendor contracts based on product specifications
Your team wants to evolve towards adaptive approaches so your first step is to hire an agile coach for the team. What type of contract should you negotiate with the coach?
D. Time and materials-pay the coach hourly for their time
An agile team is building a training safety video based on current government regulations. The project manager knows that the regulation is likely to change before the release date. How should the project manager address this change?
D. Verify the team is building the product in increments which could be adapted at the last minute if necessary.
How is chartering a hybrid-agile project different from chartering a predictive project?
D. We expect to discover the details of what will be built during the project, so the scope is typically less clearly defined.
You've been asked to coach a team that is just switching to agile. In introducing them to key agile concepts you explain that agile values some things more than others. (left column..value more, right column valued less)?
customer collab - contract negotiation, individual and interactions - process and tools. working software - comprehensive documentation, responding to change - following a plan
Marketing has asked for a copy of the plan for your agile project, including the release dates and the key features to be included in each release. What will you send them?
A. The team's product roadmap
What would be the best option for making sure your agile team is continually improving their processes and productivity?
A. Conduct an iteration retrospective after each product demo.
Which of the following would be most important to include in a charter for an agile project?
D. Authorization for the product owner to prioritize features to maximize value
In reviewing your team's increment before the iteration review, you discover a major error in the code written by the lead developer on your agile team. What should you do?
Discuss the issue with the developer without telling the other team members.
Your organization's budgeting process is still based on the assumption that projects are using a predictive approach. However, the projects in your group are now using a hybrid approach, with an agile development phase followed by a predictive rollout phase. You have been asked to report the costs of all change requests at the monthy executive meeting. What should you do?
Explain to management that changes don't increase project costs when using an agile development approach.
On the two-year agile project you are managing, the team's velocity for the first eight sprints is 43, 24, 47, 35, 24, 34, 30, and 32. Should you be worried about these results?
No; this looks like fairly typical data for an agile team's velocity.
EVA
PV - planned value - how much you should have done based off the time passed EV - earned value - how much work you have completed based on predicted cost per ____ AC - actual (current) cost BAC - budget CV - cost variance = EV-AC CPI = EV/AC SV - schedule variance = EV-PV SPI = EV/PV EAC = budget/CPI
Agile teams use the following characteristics when creating deliverables
retrospectives - improvement ideas, self organizing teams - task assignments, incremental - delivery of value, lightweight - requirements documentation
You are managing an agile project with a high level of requirements uncertainty. What is the best way to manage changes throughout the project to ensure the project goals are met?
C. Delegate authority to the team and the product owner to manage changes as they arise.
A sprint review has just been completed for your agile project. You are talking to the product owner and want to confirm that the team is delivering business value. What should you ask her
C. Did you accept the product increment the team presented to you as fully done?
You've been asked to explain the concept of an agile retrospective meeting to a stakeholder who has never worked with an agile team before. You say, "It's a meeting where we _______."
C. Reflect on what happened in the last iteration, gather lessons learned, and look for improvements
The agile project team you are managing is responsible for developing one of the five different components of a complex enterprise solution. Your PMO representative tells you she's concerned because your team is using a larger story point unit than the other four teams. What should you do?
C. Tell the PMO that this is the story point your team has chosen, and it doesn't matter how large it is relative to the other teams.
In managing your first agile project, you are trying to decide how to best keep the sponsor and other key stakeholders updated about the team's progress. You want to use one or more of the agile tools that your team is already maintaining for their own use, rather than asking the team members to create any additional status reports or project documentation. Which agile tool(s) should you use for this purpose?
C. The cumulative flow diagram
You are advising another project manager who is starting his first agile project. In addition to the development team, he would like to use subcontractors for some parts of the work, but he isn't sure how to define the acceptance criteria. Which statement would you advise him to include in the contracts?
D. "The completed deliverables must be fit for business purpose."
Why does the agile approach plan the work continuously throughout the project?
D. Agile projects are subject to uncertainty and high rates of change that make upfront planning inefficient.
Your organization is transitioning to an agile approach. You have been asked to review the company's existing standard procurement contracts and revise them as needed to reflect the new project approach. What is one of the key adjustments you want to make?
D. Increase the customer's involvement in prioritizing and reviewing the deliverables
The sponsor of your agile project asks whether the third release the team is currently building will be ready to demo at an upcoming trade show. This is the first time you have heard of this deadline. What should you tell her?
D. Some or all of the highest priority functionality will be ready to demo
What is planning like on an agile project?
D. The team might have to try out different approaches, so their plans are likely to have a high likelihood of changes.
The sponsor has suggested that your agile team skip the in-person demo meetings and just send the product owner a link to try out the latest increment of working software. She says that will give your team more time to deliver value. You want to explain the importance of an in-person demo meeting with the product owner. What will you say?
D. The team will be able to address the product owner's needs better if they can have a conversation and ask questions.
Your team is learning about agile and wants to use a hybrid approach to their next project. They have decided to use story points for estimating because:
D. They want to establish a team measure
Your team has recently adopted some agile practices. What should they use to estimate work items?
story points
On an agile project, who is responsible for ensuring the quality of the end product?
A. The development team should verify, validate, and test the product while it is being built.
Your agile team would use personas to help them stay focused on:
B. The needs of the end users
Because of a pandemic, the organization requires all teams to work from home. Two agile teams have been working on different aspects of a product. When the first sprint done remotely ends, one team had met their goals but the other had not. What had the successful project manager done right?
B. The project manager had empowered the team to work with little direct control so they were accustomed to this style.
As the manager of an agile project, you read online that a competitor is about to release a new device that offers the same innovative functionality that your team is working on. What should you do?
C. Ask the product owner if this news changes the viability of the project.
A stable, agile team is forced to work from home for a few months. The project manager wants to ensure collaboration continues and provides the team with a collaboration tool which allows team members to chat online easily. How can the project manager ensure the team uses the tool?
C. Ask the team how they best will use the new tool.
Your team wants to try Incremental delivery on their next product. Why is this useful?
D. Get an early return on investment
What's the best way to handle knowledge sharing on the agile projects you are managing?
D. Give the team many tools and opportunities to share knowledge
A community college has asked you to manage a small project to develop an introductory course for people who want to become family childcare providers. The team is using an agile approach, and so far there hasn't been much upfront planning or requirements gathering. A group of three childcare experts are serving as "authors" (subject matter experts) for the project, working remotely. They have sent you a lot of ideas for designing the course, but everyone seems to have a different opinion about the best approach. How can you best help resolve this stalemate and move forward?
A. Bring the authors together and facilitate a design session to help them come to a consensus.
Your team has demonstrated three product increments but the stakeholders have been disappointed each time. Which of the following recommendations would not improve the quality of the product increments being delivered?
A. Change to a pure agile approach and stop writing requirements.
Two members of an agile team have different opinions about the way to code a complex business rule in their software application. When the conflict first was mentioned in a daily standup, the project manager suggested both team members build a small prototype of their idea to see which would work better. Each day they both continue to report their approach is superior. What should the project manager do?
A. Ask the team how to resolve this conflict.
The IT department is evaluating a transition to agile development practices and teams. How could a project manager help management make this decision?
A. Assess the organization's culture for the ability and willingness to change.
An agile project manager is assigned to a new project while still managing two other projects. The existing project teams are in the performing stage of development with stable velocities. How should the project manager spend her next few weeks?
A. Focus on making sure the new project's charter is complete, the team has everything they need, and planning is underway.
As project manager, you overhear three of your agile team members debating the best way to design the acceptance test for a user story. They have reached a stalemate and can't decide how to proceed. What should you do?
A. Gather the rest of the team to discuss the issue and come up with a collective solution.
A small agile team has been assigned an upcoming project to update a critical website that supports complex customer contracts. The product owner is a business analyst who has strong relationships with the business stakeholders. The team is experienced and a model for other teams in the organization. The project manager has heard a rumor that the business analyst is thinking of retiring before the new project gets started. What risk response should the project manager put in place?
A. Identify a business stakeholder who will become the product owner if the analyst leaves.
Over the last few iterations, you've noticed that your agile team's cycle time has been gradually inching upward. At first, it just seemed like normal variation, but you have now decided that this is a solid trend and would like to address it in the team's next retrospective. What should you say?
A. Let's brainstorm to get to the bottom of this and understand why it is happening.
An organization is moving toward a change-driven development, consisting of teams led by an agile coach. This approach is new to the organization, and the project manager's role with these new teams hasn't been clearly defined. One project manager decides to attend her team's user story writing workshops. Why does she think these sessions are a good use of her limited time?
A. She wants to build strong relationships with the team and make sure there is a shared understanding of the product features.
A project manager has been assigned to a large project with remote business stakeholders. The stakeholders are on two different continents, have not worked together before and are mostly new to change-driven approaches. The development work is being done by three teams that are using agile methods. What is the biggest risk that the project manager should be concerned about?
A. The product owner will need to elicit the requirements of stakeholders from different languages and cultures.
On an agile software development project, the project manager asks business stakeholders to create user stories, which will be used in the development and testing of the new application. The main purpose of writing a user story is:
A. To document features or functions required by stakeholders
You are leading an agile project, and the sponsor has just told you that the organization has found someone with the specialized technical skills needed for your team's next project--a person who works on another continent, five time zones away. What is your response?
A. We'll have some challenges for communication and collaboration, but the benefits should outweigh the disadvantages.
Management has asked you to update the projected cost of running your agile team through the end of the project based on the latest project data. What information will you need from the team to update this estimate?
Burndown Graph
An agile product development team is building a new customer facing mobile feature: in store checkout. While reading the monthly corporate newsletter, the project manager learns that stores in one geographic region have temporarily closed. How should the project manager respond?
B. Contact the stores' operations manager(s) to discuss the closings and re-evaluate the in-store checkout feature's value.
As the project manager, what can you do to support your agile team's efforts to improve quality?
B. Investigate and try to quickly resolve any impediments mentioned in the team's daily stand-up.
A relatively new agile team is struggling to estimate the effort required to develop their stories. The project manager has suggested that they might want to try using planning poker. Why would the project manager recommend planning poker as an estimating technique to this team?
B. It's an efficient way to estimate that will build the team's skill for sizing stories
The scope of the product being developed for a customer is poorly defined because the customer doesn't have experience in agile or software design. How should the project manager plan to deal with this?
B. Require the customer to attend each sprint planning and sprint review session.
You've been asked to manage an agile project to enhance and update the corporate reporting system. Among other things, this will bring it into compliance with new regulations. The project is a high priority since the changes are required, but no one inside the company expects to get any business value from the project. The compliance officer is officially the sponsor, but has little interest in participating on the project, she just wants it done. How can you best engage with the sponsor?
B. Schedule an occasional meeting in the sponsor's office to report progress and ask questions.
The PMO has reconsidered a project's timeline and approach, and decided to continue with original plans to use an agile team. The team will reprogram software security features in a health records program to comply with new regulations that will be phased in over a year long period. Under what conditions would the PMO have decided that agile was an acceptable approach?
B. The time between each new regulation is estimated to allow the needed features to be built, tested and deployed without increasing the team's size or methods, or the project's time horizon.
You've managed to get the key stakeholders for your upcoming agile project together for a visioning session to reach agreement on what the project needs to accomplish. The participants might not have another chance to meet in person. How will you recommend that they spend this time?
B. Write an elevator statement.
A project manager is using a hybrid development approach for a project that involves a new technology platform the team hasn't used before. The team will be using agile development practices, but some of the team members have not been on an agile team before. The organization's data protection policies will require a detailed final testing phase before it can go live to customers. The project manager is trying to decide which project management plans will be useful for this upcoming project. Which plan will be most useful for planning a strategy to address the team's lack of experience?
C. Resource management plan
What is the most effective way to provide actionable feedback for your agile team's solution design?
C. The value management team should carefully review the early, incomplete increments.
For several months, the development team for your project has been holding reviews at the end of each iteration. As the project manager, you are pleased with their progress. However, you hear that the project sponsor has told another stakeholder that "nothing is getting done using that agile approach." What should you do?
C. Invite the sponsor to attend the team's next iteration review.
A small agile team is developing a mission-critical website for the organization. The team is experienced and highly productive. With this in mind, the project manager would like a new employee to observe the team members as they work, to understand how agile methods can be used successfully in this business domain. How should the project manager begin this process?
C. Meet with the team members and explain the importance of sharing their success with others in the organization.
You are managing a software development project for a school and your developers want to use agile techniques. The school cannot provide a product owner. When categorizing stakeholders you learn that several of the teachers are also parents to children who attend the school. How (and why) should you categorize them?
C. Categorize them in both groups because they should be included in both types of engagement.
The CFO is a key stakeholder on your agile project. One day he emails you, "I just saw the backlog, and we have a problem! We need to update the descriptions of stories 12.4 to 12.6 to reflect our new digital business strategy ." How should you respond?
C. I will refer this request to the product owner, who will decide what to do about it.
Your agile team is producing a consistent velocity and the product owner is happy with the work completed. You notice that one team member rarely interacts with others on the team and no one on the team asks for her opinions. What should you do?
D. Talk with the team member individually to determine why the lack of interaction.
An agile team is using a software testing environment managed by another team because these environments are complex to set up. The testing environment periodically fails causing the team's work to be delayed. What should the project manager do?
D. Ask the other team's coach to attend daily standups to coordinate communications about outages.
Your hybrid team is assigned to rewrite a large old system in a new technology and architecture design. Which principle of agile would be most important for this assignment?
D. Assess opportunities to deliver increments of value
For an agile project, changes are an important part of the process, allowing the product owner to maximize value delivery. As the manager of an agile project, how should you approach managing changes?
D. Changes should be addressed as low as possible on the cost of change curve.
The CIO has asked you to lead an agile project that will be updating an old system to decrease its maintenance costs. The business users agree that the update is needed but can't commit many resources to help. What must you get to ensure project success?
D. Commitment for a full-time product owner to work with the team and represent the business users.
You're trying to explain to your project management office (PMO) the differences between vendor management on a hybrid-agile project and on a traditional project. You tell them that agile contracts typically _______.
D. Encourage closer cooperation between the team and vendor.
Understanding the culture, policies, and procedures of the organization in which the project is being performed is most challenging in
D. Global organizations
A project manager is accustomed to managing projects in an agile environment, but has just accepted a full-time position in an organization that predominantly uses a plan-driven approach to managing projects. She asks a colleague to help her understand how her work will differ in this new environment. The colleague suggests that a key way in which communication may be different in a plan-driven environment is:
D. More formal documentation
Your hybrid-agile teams has chosen to use personas, Why?
D. Personas help a team understand and stay focused on the people who will use the system.
Negotiations with a customer are challenging because the customer does not understand agile contracting. The scope of the product being developed for the customer will be determined by the features prioritized in each release planning session. How can the project manager finalize the contract?
D. Politely explain the agile approach to the customer.
As the buyer in an agile contracting environment, what key consideration should you bear in mind when negotiating procurement contracts?
D. Provide a clear way to communicate the evolving scope and acceptance criteria to the seller.
A project manager is using a hybrid development approach for a project that involves a new technology platform the team hasn't used before. The team will be using agile development practices, but some of the team members have not been on an agile team before. The organization's data protection policies will require a detailed final testing phase before it can go live to customers. The project manager is trying to decide which project management plans will be useful for this upcoming project. Which plan will be most useful for planning a strategy to address the team's lack of experience?
D. Resource management plan
While engaging with the users of a new product that is in development, the project manager learns that a key business stakeholder doesn't get along with the product owner. As a result, the product owner hasn't been representing the needs of this group of users when defining features. Some of the product increments the product owner has approved will not work for these users. What should the project manager do, if anything?
D. The project manager should call this key stakeholder to confirm that there is a problem with the approved increments before deciding how to approach it.
The QA lead on an agile project is explaining to you, the project manager, that she has found a way to shorten the "testing cycle time." What is she trying to do?
Shorten the time required for a work item to complete the testing phase