Owners of a small luxury travel magazine want to expand their services to provide bookings for readers’ dream holidays. They commit 15% of the company’s annual profit over 3 years to develop and launch the service. The company creates a high-level vision statement and objectives and key results (OKRs), which they hand over to a consulting company.

Which approach and initial scope decision is suitable for this project to begin work?

A project manager for a major annual international sporting event is reviewing data collected after the second of six planned project phases and sees that the team is performing poorly. The project uses a hybrid management model, with a project manager and decentralized decision-making at the team level. The project manager learns that several critical elements are behind schedule, and some delivered services are not operating correctly, resulting in rework and more delays. Also, team members might be enjoying working with the sports teams and being in the media spotlight a bit too much.

What should the project manager do?

Project team members are concerned that a new resource does NOT seem suitable for an assigned task. How should the project manager respond to this concern?

The last three agile iterations showed a trend of increasingly prolonged test work. Which activity should the project manager plan to address the root cause?

A financial services project will be executed by a team of three teams. Each team has unique objectives for the first phase and then will merge efforts for the second phase to deliver the product. The product owner wants it done as soon as possible. In the initial draft of the schedule, team A finishes their work in a 9-week timeline, but teams B and C need 14 weeks to complete their work.

The scrum master suggests allocating resources from team A to teams B and C during weeks 10-12, to shorten the total timeline. Teams B and C agree and would like the added resources. However, team A says “no” because they need to prepare the transition plan and train staff on the product during weeks 10-14.

Which two actions should happen? (Choose two)

An established farm is struggling to maintain profitability and plans to integrate an agro-tourism project to expand the business. They hire a project manager and personnel and initiate a project. The new team members will be shared resources for both the farm and the playground project. The farm needs to continue generating cash flow to support operations until the project is integrated–in 8 months.

By the second month, the project manager learns that farm production performance has decreased drastically because the project takes up a lot of the team’s time. Which two approaches should the project manager consider to provide the best chance for the business to succeed and produce the desired outcomes? (Choose two)

A pharmaceutical company has manufactured its best-selling product for more than 50 years. Production has steadily increased, and the company is ready to make a significant investment to expand the business.

Leadership asks the project management team to carefully assess the risk of this expansion. What should the team focus on?

An agile team member has an extremely varied skill set and performs their work well on projects. This team member has been allocated to many different roles during their work history at the company. For this reason, the team member states, “I feel like I am put on projects randomly. I am not getting anywhere, and the company does not value my work.”

What should the team lead do?

A government agency is concerned about the continuity of their projects. Many senior staff members who started the agency are retiring in the next 5 to 10 years. Their knowledge and experience as project managers of past and current projects will be critical to the agency’s future success.

A project manager is engaged to steer the effort. Which two options are the best ways of ensuring knowledge transfer for continuity of the agency’s projects? (Choose two)

Two project managers are chatting in an airport lounge, on their way to a conference. They have never met and work in different companies. Project manager A tells a story about the last project, in which the team was given strict deadlines for updating artifacts and were audited to ensure risk registers and issue logs were updated at least once per week. Project manager B is shocked by project manager A’s story, because their project team is allowed to work independently, with very little reporting required.

Which statement is true?

A PMO in a large manufacturing company has been working diligently to retrain project managers and standardize software and templates across all projects, so that every project in the company will produce compliant artifacts. Which type of PMO is being described?

A project manager is assessing the risks to a hybrid project in the execution stage. At the end of each iteration, the team has only reported normal issues such as equipment malfunctions. However, the team has recently alerted the project manager to a developing problem that signal regulatory noncompliance for the product.

Which artifact should the project manager review and update?

 A project team member is consistently missing deadlines, creating bottlenecks for the rest of the team. Which action should the team take to support the team member?

A virtual team will travel to a work site and work as a colocated team for 6 weeks in Q3 of next year to transition their project to the customer. One team member, whose role is critical to the transition, is getting married during Q3 but has not told anyone until now. This team member requested 3 weeks of holiday right before the planned team travel.

What should the project manager do?

A project team is brainstorming a complex issue with the prototype in development. They have consulted numerous experts in the field and together, have narrowed down the choice of possible actions to two.

How should the team decide which action to take?

A project manager meets frequently with a company’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) coordinator, because several members of the project team wear t-shirts on Fridays that others in the organization consider controversial. They are allowed to wear the shirts, but there are numerous complaints from around the company.

What should the project manager do first?

A team member has reported a project manager to HR for shouting during meetings. Other team members validate the complaint, but when the PMO asked the project manager about this, their answer was they were only trying to motivate the team.

What is the problem here?

In an organization, some people work longer days in a 4-day week, while others work standard days 5 days per week. On one project, a mix of these schedules has caused some scheduling problems, particularly for standups and iteration demos.

Which approach should the team take?

An international bank is performing a merger as part of a major program change and hired a consulting company to perform an advisory role during the merger. The consultants recommend using agile to ensure the best chance of success.

What do the consultants mean by this?

The executives, managers and coaches of a professional sports team often disagree. On a current project to create a VIP perks program, the product owner gets wildly conflicting inputs from the stakeholders ––9 executives, managers and coaches. The product owner who is new to the organization asks the team for help on making decisions to create the initial product backlog.

What should the team do?

A project team is worried about product packaging and presentation. They receive a lot of negative feedback about this during iteration demos.

How can the team improve their chances of customer acceptance?

A project team has just successfully completed development of an underwater exploration device, which has cost more than $US3 billion to deliver. The company immediately orders five more units to be delivered, but with a budget of $US1 billion. The stakeholders’ reason for the reduced budget was since the technology has been developed, the project can be funded for building costs primarily, with a small amount for troubleshooting or development work. The stakeholders’ priority is to recoup some financial value from the first project.

How should the team and the product owner approach this situation?

An agile team is deployed to create a workable solution for helping a region with contaminated water supply. They are working with the government, contractors, and local residents to find the right technology to solve the problem. The product owner is trying to determine the urgency of the problem.

How can the team help the product owner?

A project team relies on work with an overseas contractor. For years, this contractor accepted payment in the team’s currency, but have now notified the team’s company that after next month, future payments must be made in the contractor’s local currency.

How can the team deal with this problem with the least disruption to the team?

An agile project team is working on improvements to the user experience (UX) for an online newspaper. The team thinks this is a fairly low-risk project, so they forgo a risk assessment and start working. The product owner disagrees and commissions a risk assessment.

Which statement is correct about this scenario?

An agile team member solved a problem that had blocked work for several weeks. After release of the software, it appears that the solution caused a function to fail. The quality director demands an explanation.

In which two ways should the project manager react? (Choose TWO.)

A project manager wants to know whether an agile team possesses a good combination of T-shaped skills.

What can the project manager measure to determine this?

Most of an agile team’s members are away for a month, but the project needs to make progress. The project manager outsources the work to overseas contractors to work remotely on the stories. In their first sprint, the overseas team did NOT understand certain usability requirements, but still managed to complete five (5) stories that were previously blocked because the original team could NOT handle the algorithmic complexity of the work.

What should the project manager do in this situation to make progress on the project?

A tech startup has four projects authorized and running:

1. Customer experience (CX) app development with executive stakeholders
2. Third-party app development with new vendors
3. Project with global team members who speak six languages
4. Game development using experimental technology

Which statement about risk and quality is correct?

A company initiates a project to replace aging infrastructure by adopting an emerging green technology. The team is forming and having initial conversations about how to approach the project.

Which three of the following will be helpful to the team? (Choose three)

Certain key stakeholders are dissatisfied with the development of a key feature of a project. They express their dissatisfaction during an iteration review meeting.

What should the project manager do first to resolve this issue?

At a weekly project status meeting, a key team member expresses concerns about the overall approach documented within the project management plan. The project manager is surprised because the team is in the process of executing an important component of the project and the concern has NOT been raised before.

What steps should the project manager take?

The project manager schedules an iteration review and learns that a few key stakeholders do NOT approve of the development of a feature.

What should the project manager do first to address this issue?

A project team is comprised of local and virtual team members. To manage scheduling priority conflicts among team members, the project manager schedules a video conference call.

Which conflict resolution technique does this statement demonstrate?

A project is comprised of three highly dependent parts, each being completed by its own project team. The team leader, worried that conflicts might arise when the outputs from the three teams are combined, asks for advice.

What advice should the project manager provide?

An efficient, empowered agile innovation team does NOT understand why required approvals from the legal department are allowed to delay their progress. Eventually, the team confronts the product owner in a heated exchange. The product owner replies that the approvals are needed to check for existing patents, which would block the product from going to market.

How should a project manager prevent such conflicts?

The atmosphere is tense in the sprint planning review. The agile team members are visibly unhappy—one of them kicks a chair and shouts at the product owner, “That just doesn’t make sense!”

Which two actions should the project manager take in this situation? (Choose TWO.)

Three project teams are working on parts of a single project. The parts are highly dependent on each other. The leader of the team indicates that this might create conflicts when the outputs from the three teams are combined.

What guidance should the project manager offer to the team lead?

A project is utilizing a third-party contractor. A member of the contractor’s team raises an issue with a member of the project team. The two individuals are NOT able to work out a solution. The project manager is aware of the disagreement.

Which type of communication should the project manager use first when contacting the vendor about this issue?

During the execution of a project, a key team member is concerned with the overall approach documented in the project management plan. The member surprises the project manager with negative comments about the approach during a weekly status meeting.

How should the project manager address the team member’s concerns?

A project manager is working on multiple projects. One project has new team members and is in early stages. The other projects are in various states of execution for the next few weeks.

How can the project manager develop the new project team over the next few weeks?

A project team is small, and the team members have known each other for a long time. The team’s project is in the execution stage. Recently, a team member told the new project manager that another team member has been complaining about how the project is being managed.

How should this new project manager respond?

A project manager needs stakeholder involvement in order to identify strategic and operational assumptions and constraints. Unfortunately, the project manager is having difficulty obtaining consistent input due to lack of participation.

In which two ways can the project manager encourage the stakeholder to participate and collaborate? (Choose TWO.)

An R&D executive, who is a project stakeholder, occasionally visits the agile team’s work area to give instructions about urgent feature work. The team begins work. During sprint reviews, the product owner becomes upset that the team worked on the requested features.

How should the team address the problem?

A Scrum innovation team is funded at varying levels by six (6) market units. Four (4) niche market units complain they are neglected because the team prioritizes mainstream unit goals. The marketing director suggests devoting a constant 40% of the team effort to the four (4) niche units in a balanced way.

How can the team support this request?

The agile team excels at solving technical problems, but when the product owner requests creative or business-related ideas, the team falls silent.

Is this a problem?

A project manager is having difficulty obtaining consistent input from stakeholders and needs their input to identify assumptions and constraints.

How can the project manager improve stakeholder engagement?

Leaders of high-performing project teams __________ team members’ skills and knowledge and keep team members __________ throughout the project.

Fill in the blanks with the correct set of responses.

A project’s daily standup meetings are long, often lasting more than two hours. The project team uses the standup meetings for extended discussions about solutions to project obstacles.

What should the project manager do to improve the daily standup meetings?

A new project team is setting early priorities, and they plan to gain the customer’s trust by delivering value as quickly as possible. Team member C mentions that they have worked with the project sponsor on other projects.

How should the project manager connect these two facts and create an advantage for the project team?

A project to bring a new model of a product to market is in execution when a competitor files a lawsuit claiming that the product violates several of their patents. The courts side with the competitor and issue a cease-and-desist order.

What should the project manager do first?

A project team has just finished development and is planning to have the customer and the sponsor inspect the system’s user interface for acceptance.

Which project management process will facilitate this activity?

The project iteration’s costs are below estimates and work is being completed well ahead of schedule. The resource costs and the scope are being measured in story points.

How should the burndown chart look?

A large construction project is in execution. According to the project schedule, today the project manager has individual mentoring sessions with three stakeholders that are new to the project.

When mentoring these stakeholders, which of the following project management processes might the project manager be performing? (Choose two.)

You are in the process of developing the project management plan for a project which will use agile methods for product development. You want to ensure that the key stakeholders will be kept apprised of the business value delivered throughout the course of the project.

What is your best course of action? (Choose three.)

During a sprint retrospective, the project team suggests purchasing a 3D printer to print out product prototypes. The team says that their work would be more efficient with the printer and allow the project to be completed ahead of schedule. The organization does not have access to such a printer and purchasing it would put the project over budget.

What action, if any, should the scrum master take?

During project execution, after investing in the training of your project team members, you notice that one of them consistently exceeds expectations while performing her tasks. To have the project benefit from the team member’s skills and reduce the risk of missing defects in the project deliverables, you have tasked the team member to handle the most advanced quality inspections.

Where would you record the new duties of this team member?

A project manager is developing the project schedule and wants to empower the team with more decision-making authority than past projects. He creates a Gantt chart that displays activities down to the work package level of the WBS, which are assigned to the team rather than individuals. He then records the work packages in the backlog of a Kanban board.

How might the project manager use inspirational motivation to empower the team through idealized attributes and behaviours?

You are leading a project to develop a smart card for a fare collection system. The client, The Ministry of Transportation, requests that, due to high risk, the project is managed using traditional methods. To develop the system, the team needs a designated client’s representative who is able to clarify requirements and provide ongoing feedback.

Which process will you use to identify this representative?

An agile project enters its third iteration. Even though the team diligently adheres to agile best practices, the scrum master feels that there is something wrong with the team dynamics. Each team member works independently, and during scrum events, the team members are not open to one another and avoid conflict.

In what stage of the Tuckman development model does the team currently operate, and what can the scrum master do to help the team to move onto the next stage?

During a project, the project manager introduces a new column to the risk register. This modification proves to be beneficial in monitoring project risks. The project manager documents the best practice in the lessons learned register and plans to transfer this information to the lessons learned repository.

What else might the project manager do to ensure this best practice is considered for future projects?

A new startup is running a project to design and build a website for families to share solutions to problems encountered when raising children. The resulting knowledge base aims to identify trends in issues, help families identify common problems, and find solutions that work best for parents and kids.

Which of the following should be considered the highest priority when planning and designing how the project team works with the information collected about the children?

When reviewing the issue log, the project manager finds a new entry indicating that additional fencing is needed to address ground security risks on the project. After reviewing the risk register, she finds ground security among the risks identified during project planning. She wants to address the risk but is not sure if the project has enough funds to cover it.

Which data analysis technique can be used to make this determination?

A project team is producing deliverables incrementally in order to take advantage of early revenue. The project is trending to meet all of the baselines. However, the project manager has determined that the team’s velocity has been 50 points for each of the first five sprints with an SPI of 0.83 over the same time period.

How should the project manager respond to the team’s performance?

Four members of an agile team are co-located while two others work remotely from home. The project manager wants to purchase office supplies and other physical and digital tools for the team members to support their day-to-day work, enable collaboration, and promote the use of agile best practices. Which of the following is best for the project manager to buy?

During the development of the project management plan, the project manager learns that past projects suffered from scope creep, ineffective change control process, and low stakeholder satisfaction. To ensure the current project is managed better, the project manager decides to institute regular interactions with the stakeholder community throughout the project.

Which of the following would be the least likely outcome of the project manager’s decision?

To reduce potential conflict and increase productivity, the project manager creates a team charter with clear expectations of acceptable behaviour and diligently enforces the terms of the charter. Despite these efforts, team conflict has become a significant issue and threatens the successful completion of the project.

What could the project manager have done differently to avoid this situation?

You are managing a project, which has been plagued with quality issues, and you decide to schedule a lesson learned meeting to determine how to address the quality issues. The meeting is rather contentious with lengthy discussions about everything that has gone wrong on the project but adjourned without any concrete actions to prevent the problems from recurring.

What might have made the meeting more productive?

The project progresses, the project manager gets complaints from stakeholders who say that project status meetings and email reports are too infrequent to keep the stakeholders up-to-date with the project’s status. The project manager reviews the communications management plan and submits a change request to modify the way the status is reported.

Which of the following is best for the project manager to include in the change request?

A project is in planning. The project has many unknown components making it hard to decompose and schedule adequately. You are a senior project manager, and in a project like this, you would typically plan the schedule to a higher level first and wait until the project has begun to plan the lower levels. However, this project has been assigned to a junior project manager. She is in the process to develop the schedule management plan and approaches you for advice on how to better accomplish this task.

By looking for your advice, what tool is the junior project manager using to plan her project?

A project manager experienced in predictive methods is taking on an agile project for the first time. To help in making a successful transition, the project manager makes a list of situations that may arise from inadequate action as a servant leader.

Which three situations would be on this list? (Choose THREE.)

As the project gets the go-ahead, the project manager requests that with each consecutive sprint, the product owner and team take a proactive approach to managing project risks.

How should this request be addressed?

As the last sprint of the project is about to end, the company realizes that the product does not comply with the data privacy laws of the country where the product is to be deployed. Due to budget constraints, the company has to decide on whether to pay the incompliance fines or do rework. Rework would involve significant changes to the performance baseline.

In this situation, which of the following is most likely to help?

An agile team meets with the customer and stakeholders to plan their upcoming agile project. The participants are looking for a tool that would help them understand the sets of high-value features to be created over time, identify omissions in the backlog, and effectively plan releases that will deliver value to the customer in every iteration.

Which of the following tools would best meet the needs of the meeting participants?

A project manager has submitted a change request which was reviewed and approved by the change control board (CCB). However, the committee chairperson overrules the decision and denies the change request on the basis of its budget and schedule impacts.

How can the project manager verify if the chairperson has this authority?

A project management plan specifies that the deliverables will be developed iteratively, but the reporting to the stakeholders will be done using predictive tools and techniques. As project execution begins, the project manager collects trends about velocity, costs, and quality per each iteration. Then the project manager sums up the data and extrapolates it at a project level.

What is the project manager likely trying to accomplish?

As an agile team works its way through the seventh iteration, a new stakeholder joins the project. The stakeholder frequently contacts the team members to request information and question their methods. The scrum master notices that the productivity of the team drops.

What is the best course of action for the scrum master?

A company has been merged with a former competitor. The merger undergoes a major reorganization. As a result, an agile team is assigned to a new manager who announces that the project has dropped in priority and will lose two of its ten members but would still need to deliver on time.

What is the best course of action for the project manager?

On a project, two change requests were recently submitted for review and approval. One change request was submitted to repair a defective system. The other change request was submitted to modify the terms and conditions of a contract with one of the suppliers. Both of the change requests have been reviewed and approved by the change control board (CCB).

Which of the following processes is least likely to be performed as a result of the approved change requests?

The project manager arranges a series of planning meetings with relevant stakeholders to determine the type and quantity of materials and hardware needed to complete the project. The meeting participants also discuss the required skill levels of each team resource needed for the project and the effort required to complete each activity in the work packages.

Which of the following documents is the least likely outcome of these planning meetings?

As the project team demonstrates the product increment developed during the last sprint, an influential business stakeholder throws offensive comments about the product. When the product owner asks for details, the stakeholder does not cooperate. As the meeting goes on, the team realizes that the stakeholder has negative perceptions about the project.

What should the team do?

Project team members are concerned that a new resource does NOT seem suitable for an assigned task.

How should the project manager respond to this concern?

A project team is using a risk-adjusted backlog to compare the value of addressing the existing project risks and the business value of the product’s features. The team has estimated dollar value for delivering the product features.

Which of the following should they use to determine the value of addressing project risks?

A vendor has been contracted by a business to develop a marketing campaign for their new product. Some of the contract items are fixed, such as warranties and arbitrations, and are locked ina master services agreement (MSA). Others, such as services rates and product descriptions, are subject to change.

Which of the following should the business use to secure contractual relationships with the vendor for these subject-to-change items?

As a project manager, you are in the process of obtaining team members. You lobbied for a particular developer that has worked on similar projects; however, that developer is now committed to a different project.

What should you do?