Chapter 15. A little last-minute review: Check your knowledge

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Wow, you sure covered a lot of ground in the last 14 chapters! Now it’s time to take a look back and drill in some of the most important concepts that you learned. That’ll keep it all fresh and give your brain a final workout for exam day!

Process Magnets

Can you put all of the processes in the right knowledge areas? Give it a shot—and while you’re at it, see if you can put them inside each knowledge area in the order that they’re typically performed on a project.

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Answers in “Process Magnets Solutions”.

Here’s how to do this next section

This next section consists of a series of questions grouped together by knowledge area. To make this as effective as possible:

* Make this the only PMP study activity you do today.

* Give yourself plenty of time to do it.

* Make sure you drink lots of water while you’re answering the questions.

* As you’re answering the questions, think about each answer and only mark down one response, even if you’re not 100% sure.

* After you do each section, read through each question again.

* Don’t look at the answers until you’ve gone through all of the knowledge areas.

* Make sure you get plenty of sleep the night after you do these questions.

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Integration and Overall PMBOK® Questions

  1. You’re managing a project for a military subcontractor to modify the software for a missile guidance system. You’re planning the project, and need to take into account information about the company’s operating environment. Which of the following is not an example of the factors you are looking at:

    1. Marketplace conditions

    2. The forecast for project completion, including ETC and TCPI

    3. Government standards you need to comply with

    4. The political climate that can affect your project

  2. The CFO of a company tells you that you need to include a new feature in software that’s being produced by a project you are managing. The deadline for the project is tight, and if you take on the extra work then the project will come in late. What best describes the first thing that you should do?

    1. Update the Project Management plan to make sure the new feature is included in the project.

    2. Tell the CFO that he needs to wait until you’re working on the next version, and then submit a change request to the change control board.

    3. Tell the CFO that the deadline is too tight, and the feature can’t be included.

    4. Evaluate the impact that the change will have on the project.

  3. Which of the following BEST describes the role of the project sponsor?

    1. Assigning work to the project team

    2. Paying for the project

    3. Politically supporting the project inside the organization

    4. Defining the type of organization (matrix, functional, etc.)

  4. Which of the following is not a part of the Project Management plan?

    1. The lifecycle selected for the project

    2. The level of implementation for each of the processes

    3. The organization’s staffing and retention guidelines

    4. Techniques used to communicate with stakeholders

Schedule Questions

  1. You’re working on an IT project to set up a development environment, including designing and building a computer room, installing the operating systems and software, and performing a security evaluation. You need at least two weeks to order the hardware before you can configure it and install the operating systems. Which of the following best describes this relationship?

    1. Lead

    2. Lag

    3. Finish-to-Start (FS)

    4. Start-to-Start (SS)

  2. You’re planning an IT project to set up a development environment, including designing and building a computer room, installing the operating systems and software, and performing a security evaluation. Your project includes three different activities that involve three different network technicians splicing ends onto wires in order to build their own ethernet cables, because that’s less expensive than buying prepackaged ones. Every ethernet cable must be tested with a qualification tester. That’s an expensive piece of equipment, and there are only a few of them that must be shared among all of the technicians in the company. You need to plan your schedule based on the availability of the testing equipment. What’s the best place to find that information?

    1. Staffing requirements

    2. Activity network diagram

    3. Resource calendar

    4. Activity resource requirements

  3. You’re working on an IT project to set up a development environment, including designing and building a computer room, installing the operating systems and software, and performing a security evaluation. Once the operating system on a machine is installed, it needs to be imaged and copied to three identical boxes. Which of the following best describes this relationship?

    1. Lead

    2. Lag

    3. Finish-to-Start (FS)

    4. Start-to-Start (SS)

  4. You’re working on an IT project to set up a development environment, including designing and building a computer room, installing the operating systems and software, and performing a security evaluation. Your team comes up with a best-case scenario for the activity that involves ordering and installing the equipment. If everything goes perfectly, they feel it will take five weeks. However, they think it’s much more likely to take nine. A team member points out that on his last project, there was a major equipment delivery delay that cost the project an extra four weeks, and the rest of the team agrees that this is a possibility in a worst-case scenario. Use a three-point estimate to calculate how long you should expect this activity to take.

    1. 5 weeks

    2. 9 weeks

    3. 12 weeks

    4. 13 weeks

Cost Questions

  1. Which of the following best describes funding limit reconciliation?

    1. Comparing your project’s budget against the project’s reserves

    2. Comparing your project’s planned expenditures against the funding constraints

    3. Comparing your project’s planned value against the actual costs

    4. Comparing your project’s net present value against the internal rate of return

  2. Your project has a budget at completion (BAC) of $75,000, and you need to figure out if you’re on track to meet it. You know that you’ve already spent $56,000, and you’re 70% done with the project. If your project continues expenditures at the current rate, what calculation do you need to perform to find the lowest that you can allow your CPI to go before you’ve exceeded your project’s budget?

    1. TCPI

    2. SV

    3. SPI

    4. CV

  3. You’re managing a construction project to install 7,500 light switches in a new high-rise building. You’ve installed 3,575 of them so far, and you’ve spent $153,500 of your total budget of $245,000. Which of the following is true?

    1. The AC is $153,500, so I’m ahead of schedule.

    2. The ETC is $168,995, so I’m within my budget.

    3. The CV is $36,880, so I’ve exceeded my budget.

    4. The CPI is .7597, so I’ve exceeded my budget.

  4. You’re managing a construction project, and you’re estimating your project’s activities using a spreadsheet that a consulting company created for you. You have to fill in the dry weight of the materials, the number of people required to do the work, the type of building you’re working on, and other information about the project. Which best describes what you are doing?

    1. Parametric estimation

    2. Analogous estimation

    3. Bottom-up estimation

    4. Top-down estimation

Quality Questions

  1. Which of the following is not considered when you are calculating cost of quality?

    1. How much it costs to repair deliverables when they don’t meet requirements

    2. The cost of training the team to perform inspections

    3. The cost of working with customers who find problems with the work delivered to them

    4. The cost of gaining formal acceptance of project deliverables

  2. Which of the following is not an example of quality assurance?

    1. Examining the way deliverables are produced to see if processes are being followed

    2. Examining deliverables to see if they meet requirements

    3. Examining a group of deliverables to figure out why they all had the same defect

    4. Examining the company’s documentation on how processes are to be performed

  3. Which of the following best describes a situation where statistical sampling is appropriate?

    1. You just got a shipment of 50,000 parts, and you need to figure out if enough of them are within tolerances to be used on your project.

    2. You need to figure out which defects are critical, and which can be delivered to your customer and repaired later.

    3. You need to use the rule of seven on a control chart.

    4. You need to determine if your project is ahead of schedule and within budget.

  4. You’re planning your project’s quality activities. You know that as you go through your project, your team will find lots of ways to improve how your company does work in the future. You need a way to handle that information in a systematic manner. What document is best used to plan for this?

    1. Quality checklist

    2. Process Improvement plan

    3. Quality Management plan

    4. Quality metrics

Communications Questions

  1. Bob and Sue are stakeholders in your project. Sue is in the high-power, low-interest quadrant of the power/interest grid. Bob is in the low-power, high-interest quadrant. Which of the following best describes the approach you should take:

    1. Sue needs to participate in every important meeting, while Bob needs to have his opinion heard in those meetings.

    2. You need to make sure that Bob is on the change control board, but Sue requires only minimum effort.

    3. You need to go out of your way to satisfy all of Sue’s needs, while Bob has to be kept in the loop on important decisions.

    4. Sue needs to be managed closely, and you must satisfy Bob by making sure he feels his needs are being met.

  2. A project manager is analyzing the communications requirements for a project. There are six team members, four stakeholders, and two subcontractors. He needs to find the number of potential communication channels. How many channels are there?

    1. 13

    2. 55

    3. 66

    4. 78

  3. You’re about to close your project when you are surprised to get an email from someone you’ve never spoken to before. He is very angry, because he’s directly impacted by your project, and there are specific things he needs from it and you aren’t delivering those things. Which best describes the communications process you are in?

    1. You did not manage communications effectively.

    2. You did not identify a project stakeholder.

    3. You did not encode your communications.

    4. You did not have a Stakeholder Management strategy.

  4. You are in the process of making relevant information available to your project’s stakeholders. Which of the following is not a tool or technique that you would use?

    1. Hard copies of documents interoffice-mailed to stakeholders

    2. Power/interest grid that includes all stakeholders

    3. Conference calls with stakeholders

    4. An online folder that contains project documents

Risk Questions

  1. A project manager is analyzing project risks by using quantitative techniques to assign a numeric value to each of those risks. Which of the following tools and techniques is not used for this?

    1. EMV analysis that uses a decision tree

    2. Sensitivity analysis to determine which risks pose the biggest threat

    3. A Probability and Impact matrix that assigns numeric values to each risk priority

    4. A simulation that runs through many different project scenarios

  2. One of your construction project team members warns you that your concrete supplier caused serious delays in his last project because he delivered the wrong kind of concrete. You discuss it with the team, and decide that you need to accept the possibility that this will happen. But you make back-up plans with an alternate provider by putting a down payment on an emergency shipment, just in case. This is an example of:

    1. Avoidance

    2. Transferrance

    3. Mitigation

    4. Acceptance

  3. A project manager is forced to dip into his management reserve. Which of the following is the most likely cause of this?

    1. One of the risks on the risk register caused a budget overrun.

    2. The project went over budget because the project manager miscalculated his forecast.

    3. A risk that was never planned for occurred.

    4. The team’s estimates were incorrect.

  4. Your software project team informs you that another team working at the company built a tool that will save three weeks on the project. You ask the other team’s project manager to have his team members share the tool with your team members. Which best describes this strategy?

    1. Exploiting

    2. Sharing

    3. Enhancing

    4. Accepting

Procurement Questions

  1. A seller is in trouble because she took on a contract that overran its budget, and now her company has to eat the cost out of their own budget. Which of the following best describes his contract?

    1. Time and materials (T&M)

    2. Firm fixed price (FFP)

    3. Cost plus incentive fee (CPIF)

    4. Cost plus fixed fee (CPFF)

  2. A project manager for a software project hires a subcontractor to build a module that will be used in the rest of the project. When it’s time to integrate that module into the rest of the code, there are serious quality problems. The subcontractor claims that the module meets its requirements, but the project manager’s lead developer says that the requirements have clearly been violated. The contract is unclear about how to handle the situation. It’s clear that the contract needs to be amended to indicate a solution, but there is no agreement on the exact wording of the change. What best describes the next step for the project:

    1. The buyer and seller must proceed to claims administration.

    2. The buyer should file a lawsuit against the seller.

    3. The buyer should conduct an audit of the seller.

    4. The buyer and seller must adhere strictly to the wording of the contract.

  3. A buyer and seller have a teaming agreement. Which of the following best describes their relationship?

    1. The seller and buyer both have team members on every project team.

    2. The buyer can dictate the structure of the seller’s project teams.

    3. The seller is free to dictate deliverables and contract terms.

    4. The seller has input into project decisions, and representation in the buyer’s management structure.

  4. You’re a project manager planning a project that requires that you hire a contractor. Before you can find sellers, you need to develop a document that defines the portion of the work that the contractor will do. Which of the following is not true about this document?

    1. It’s based on the project scope baseline.

    2. It includes exact specifications for the deliverables the contract will produce.

    3. Its terms are either fixed price or cost reimbursable.

    4. It must completely define the work that the contractor must do.

Great job! It looks like you’re almost ready

If you’ve read all the chapters, done all the exercises, and taken all of the practice questions, then you have a solid grasp on the material for the PMP exam. You’re almost ready to get certified! By the way, don’t worry if you didn’t get some of the questions on the past few pages. This was really hard stuff—some of it was even harder than the PMP exam. Remember, a great way to prepare is to write your own Question Clinic–style questions for anything that’s giving you trouble.

Note

So if you did get them, you should feel very proud of yourself!

Process Magnets Solutions

Can you put all of the processes in the right knowledge areas? Give it a shot—and while you’re at it, see if you can put them inside each knowledge area in the order that they’re typically performed on a project.

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Integration Answers

  1. B.

    Since this question is asking about the company’s operating environment, it’s really asking you to figure out which of the answers is not an enterprise environmental factor. Marketplace conditions, government standards, and political climate are enterprise environmental factors, but forecasts aren’t—that’s a Cost Management output.

  2. D.

    Whenever your project’s scope changes, that means you need to put your project through change control. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to have your team change the way they’ll work, or reject the change outright. The first step in evaluating any change is understanding the impact that it will have on the project.

  3. B.

    The main role of the sponsor is to provide funding for the project. That’s why the sponsor is an important stakeholder. However, the sponsor does not necessarily have a specific role on the project beyond paying for it.

    Note

    That doesn’t mean that the sponsor can’t also be involved in other things. A sponsor who’s paying for a project also wants it to succeed, and will often fill other roles on the project as well.

  4. C.

    When you put together your Project Management plan, one of the first things that you do is select a project methodology (or lifecycle), and determine exactly how each of the processes will be implemented. Your Communications Management plan will definitely have specifics about how you communicate with your stakeholders, because that’s a really important part of managing a project. But your Project Management plan doesn’t typically include your company’s policies. For example, guidelines about how your company hires and retains staff are usually set by an HR department, and they generally don’t vary from project to project.

    Note

    Staffing and retention guidelines are an example of one of your company’s policies, and policies are enterprise environmental factors.

Cost Answers

  1. B.

    Funding limit reconciliation means checking the project’s expenditures—how much you’ve already spent—against any limits that your company has on the commitments of funds. Companies typically don’t allow project managers to throw unlimited amounts of money at the project, so this makes sure that the project can be done within the company’s guidelines…so you can catch cost overruns before you’ve spent more than you’re allowed to spend! This is how you know you haven’t blown your budget—by comparing it against the hard limits set by your company.

  2. A.

    When you’re asked to figure out the lower limit of your CPI to keep your project within its budget, you’re being asked to calculate the to-complete performance index (TCPI). If you’ve got a BAC, an AC, and a % complete, then you know enough to compute the EAC, so you should use the formula TCPI = (BAC – EV) ÷ (EAC – AC).

    Note

    The numbers in this question were a red herring. You didn’t need them to come up with the answer.

  3. D.

    The first step in figuring this out is to determine the actual % complete, which you can do by figuring that you’ve installed 3,570 of the total 7,500 light switches, or 3,575 ÷ 7,500 = 47.6%. Then you can use the formulas, which show you that CPI is .7597, telling you that you’ve exceeded your budget:

    • Actual % complete = 47.6%

    • AC = $153,500 (but since this doesn’t tell you anything about your schedule, answer A is incorrect)

    • EV = BAC × actual % complete = $245,000 × 47.6% = $116,620

    • CV = EV – AC = $116,620 – $153,500 = –$36,880 (since the CV is negative, you’re below your budget, so answer C is incorrect; the CV in this case is negative)

    • CPI = EV ÷ AC = $116,620 ÷ $153,500 = .7597

    • EAC = BAC ÷ CPI = $245,000 ÷ .7597 = $322,495

    • ETC = EAC – AC = $322,495 – $153,500 = $168,995 (which doesn’t actually tell you whether or not you’re within your budget, so answer B is incorrect)

  4. A.

    A really common way of doing parametric estimation involves entering numbers into a spreadsheet that performs calculations based on historical data gathered from previous projects.

Communications Answers

  1. C.

    Since Sue is in the high-power, low-interest quadrant, she needs to be kept satisfied. This means that she has to feel that her needs are actually being met, but since she’s not following the project on a day-to-day basis, the only way you can do that is by delivering a final product that meets those needs. Bob is low-power, high-interest, so he needs to be kept informed. This means that he needs to feel like he’s constantly in the loop on important decisions, even if he won’t actively be taking part in them.

  2. D.

    This is a basic “lines of communication” problem—you need to figure out how many people are communicating. In this case it’s six team members, four stakeholders, two subcontractors…and don’t forget the project manager! That’s 6 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 13 people. The formula is n(n – 1) ÷ 2 = 13(12) ÷ 2 = 78.

  3. B.

    The definition of a stakeholder includes “anyone who is directly impacted by your project.” That means this person is a stakeholder! Since you never spoke to this person, you failed to identify him as a stakeholder, and as a result you did not meet his needs.

    Note

    Tools and techniques like a Stakeholder Management strategy or stakeholder register are great, but they don’t work well if you haven’t identified all of the project’s stakeholders.

  4. B.

    When you’re making relevant information available to your project’s stakeholders, you’re performing the Manage Communications process. The power/interest grid is a useful tool, but it’s not part of Manage Communications.

Procurement Answers

  1. B.

    The firm fixed price contract is the riskiest type of contract that a seller can take on. When the project’s costs exceed the price of the contract, the seller has to pay for the overrun.

    Note

    This is usually bad for the buyer, too! Contracting works best when it’s a win-win situation for both the buyer and the seller.

  2. A.

    Claims administration is what you do when there are contested changes to the contract, and the seller and buyer can’t reach an agreement on the change. Any time you see a dispute or appeal between the buyer and seller and there’s no clear resolution, that’s where claims administration comes into play.

  3. D.

    When a buyer and seller have a teaming agreement, the seller acts as a partner with the buyer. It’s not just a typical “here’s the terms, you go off and do the work” relationship that a lot of sellers and buyers have. Instead, the buyer asks for the seller’s input, and makes the seller an active part of the management of the project.

    Note

    When a seller works on a project with a teaming agreement, the team members from both the buyer’s and seller’s teams usually have a lot of mutual respect. That’s why this is a really effective way to do procurement.

  4. C.

    A document that defines the portion of work the contractor will do is the procurement statement of work (SOW). It’s a clear, concise, unambiguous, and complete document that describes the work that must be done, and can include specifications of deliverables. But it doesn’t include contract terms—those terms are part of the contract itself.