Sample Q3 2023

Ramsay is a member of the delivery team for an app-based cab/taxi management company called Zoom. They are a major competitor for Uber, and they use Agile practices to drive their projects. Zoom is planning to integrate food ordering from takeaways as a feature within their taxi-based app. The feature would first get launched with Android and then expand to i-OS. However, the team needs to validate the required features of the app in the marketplace before moving into the development of the same. Which project life cycle is suitable for this team?

You are the project manager for rolling out a new cloud-based Learning Management System (LMS) at East Coast University. The project also involves progressive phaseout of the old LMS systems (local) and phase-in of the new one (cloud-based). The client expectation is a seamless transition between the two systems. In your daily stand-up meeting, you have been notified of four issues today. How will you prioritize the issues for the day as the project manager?

(1) The office lighting needs to be overhauled due to insufficient illumination across the floor affecting employee ergonomics.

(2) Few of your programmers need Java-script training which needs completion.

(3) There is a government approval for sharing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) which needs to be expedited since it’s late.

(4) There is a critical fault identified when the campus servers are trying to ping the cloud servers.

Note: In your PMP Exam, you will be required to drag & drop boxes containing the options (1,2,3,4) in order of priority (most critical to least critical)

You are a developer in an agile-managed project. Your product owner is a person who likes to carefully plan things out well in advance. He likes things to be well-organized and pay a great deal of attention to detail. He takes a logical approach to achieve goals and completing project tasks and is able to work at a steady pace toward accomplishing these tasks. He also places a great deal of emphasis on the traditions and laws of the company and makes sure that everyone abides by them. Which MBTI personality indicator does your product owner most likely fall into?

You are leading a scrum project as the CSM within your organization but most of your team members are new and inexperienced. Moreover, quite a few of them have been reassigned from other departments as a part of the company’s job rotation policy. Hence, they have little technical domain knowledge. You as the CSM need to set up this team for success. What is the most effective strategy you can take here?

In iteration-based agile, the product owner often works with the team to prepare some stories for the upcoming iteration during one or more sessions in the middle of the iteration. The purpose of these meetings is to analyze enough stories, so the team understands what the stories are and how large the stories are in relation to each other. What is this process called?

Anitha is studying the release burndown chart for her Scrum team before the morning sprint review meeting. She notices that at a point, the graph moves below X-axis. Chose the best conclusion:

Conflict management is the process of managing and assuaging the negative components of a conflict while increasing the positive aspects. Arrange the approaches for conflict resolution with the correct definitions. In your PMP Exam, you would be required to drag and arrange the ‘approaches’ with their ‘definitions’

Approach: 

(1) Withdraw/Avoid

(2) Compromise/Reconcile

(3) Force/Direct

(4) Collaborate/Problem Solving

(5) Smooth/Accommodate

Definition: 

(A) Pursuing your viewpoint at the expense of others. Offering only win-lose solutions typically enforced via positional power

(B) Retreating from an actual or potential conflict resolution. Postponing the issue to be handled by others at a later date

(C) Emphasizing areas of agreement rather than differences. Conceding your position to the need of others to maintain harmony in relationships.

(D) Incorporating multiple viewpoints from different perspectives. Enabling cooperative attitude and open dialogue to reach consensus and commitment

(E) Searching for solutions that bring some degree of satisfaction to all parties. But each of the parties let go of something

The Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator is a self-report inventory designed to identify a person's personality type, strengths, and preferences. The questionnaire was developed by Isabel Myers and her mother Katherine Briggs based on their work with Carl Jung's theory of personality types during World War II. What does the S-N scale of the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator signify?

You are the project manager for a governance project which requires a lot of liaising with local council authorities. They are your key stakeholders. One stakeholder from the Customs & Duty department one day comes up to you and asks for more frequent and detailed updates on the project. He is also keen on helping you with the project in whatever way possible. This guy is a young & energetic person and you understand his enthusiasm and proactiveness. But you want to know a bit more about the background of this stakeholder. Which project artifact should you refer to before going into further discussion with this stakeholder?

You are the project manager for the construction of a new office building. The project is nearing the handover to the client. The final piece, which is landscaping in & around the new building is about to start. You are reviewing the project schedule and the interdependencies between the activities. You see that the landscaping could be scheduled to start 2 weeks prior to the scheduled punch list completion for the handover of the office building. This would be shown as a finish-to-start with a 2-week______?

Fill in the blanks

You are the product owner for an agile-based project which plans to develop the student database for King's College, London. You are in the middle of an iteration and in one of your daily standups, you get to know that a key approval from UK Government about Data Protection was missed and currently your project is non-compliant with UK's Data Protection Act. What is your best step as a product owner here?

Brian is a project manager and he is in the process of estimating team resources that will be required for his project. Due to the nature of the project and selected development approach, Brian is having the challenge that only a few top-level WBS-es have been identified with the remaining to be progressively elaborated throughout the project. What is the best approach for the estimation of team resources for the project?

You are the agile practitioner for an iterative agile-based project. As the first step after the collection of user stories, you have developed a prioritized matrix that describes the product features that will be delivered in each release over time. Which project artifact is being referred to here?

A software development team can begin to write the scope of development only after 2 months of the start of design. This is to ensure that the team has sufficient data points from the design for writing the scope What kind of dependency this would represent?

You are having a project status review meeting with your sponsor at the final stages of an iteration-based agile project. Your sponsor is not very happy with the way the project has been executed. His primary concern is with schedule, which initially you committed to being 40 weeks but the whole project is now trending at 48 weeks. Still, there are about 3-4 weeks story points left. As an agile practitioner, you should have tracked the team's performance over time. How should you have achieved this task?

Zen Pharma Inc. is planning to acquire Rochester Pharmaceuticals. The acquisition is taking place in a highly regulated industry. The project sponsor and the board chairman have asked for a packaging change that prima face seems to violate the legal requirements. What should be the first step the project manager should take here?

You are the facilitator for an iteration-based agile project and one of your team members come to you asking for help regarding one deliverable that was assigned to her in the last standup meeting. The help required from her side is primarily to provide a training of SAP-PS module to her team. Where should you discuss this issue with the rest of your team?

Eight months into an agile project closely linked to the expansion strategy of a company, the Board of Directors is closely monitoring its progress. The CIO however, expresses frustration that the last weekly burn-up chart records show the projected completion date significantly moving back & forth several times.

How can the project manager estimate the completion date with more accuracy & certainty?

Mustafa joins as an Agile Coach in a team that is developing an application for investment banking firms. He observes that there are different scrum teams working on developing different features of the application. However, the teams are struggling to arrive at a common alignment for ‘definition of done (DoD). What should Mustafa do as the Agile Coach?

A project manager is preparing a project schedule to automate a pick-and-place operation in an assembly line with COBOTs. The sponsor has told the PM that the schedule should be aligned with the operations dept. manager who is responsible for the production of that line. The PM approaches the Ops manager for approval, but the Ops manager asks that how the PM has estimated that the site installation of the COBOT would be completed in 3 weeks. He feels that it is too high, and he cannot provide a 3-week downtime on the line for installing the COBOT since he has to meet the demand from the planning department. The PM replies that he has used a statistical relationship between historical data (past automation installations in the plant) and other variables (# of people of supplier called for the installation of the COBOT) to calculate an estimate for the duration. Which estimating technique the PM has used here?

In projects with evolving requirements, high risk, or significant uncertainty, the scope is not understood at the beginning of the project or it evolves during the project. Agile methods deliberately try to spend less time defining and agreeing on the scope in the early stages of the project and spend more time establishing the process for its ongoing discovery and refinement. How do agile teams validate scope and refine requirements?

During a backlog assessment, you notice an item that you saw on the updated risk register: ‘arrange PHP refresher course for development team’. When you review the risk log, you see that this issue was highlighted months ago and is also mentioned ‘closed’ three months earlier. What should you do as the project manager?

You are the Agile Coach for a team that is developing a software to manage a fleet of trucks for DHL via an app-based interface. Capability building of your team is your top priority. What are some of the techniques you can use to appraise the skills of a team member? (select all that apply)

What should be your best approach as a CSM while leading an Agile-driven project in an organization where Agile terms and language do not fit the organizational culture? (Eq. Bureaucratic or Government organizations)

You are the project manager for rolling out a new employee health benefits portal for Fixmore Inc. One of your team members has escalated to you that the new health benefits application is not compatible with Fixmore Inc.’s existing server architecture. It will require an upgrade to run smoothly. After checking your project scope, you find out that server upgrades are not in the budget this year but can be added next year as an additional scope item. Arrange your actions to resolve this situation from ‘most preferred’ to ‘least preferred’.

Note: In your PMP Exam, you will be required to drag & drop boxes containing the options (1,2,3,4) in order of priority (most preferred to least preferred)

(1) You wait till next year to get the additional funds and plan to launch the application as it is for now

(2) You go straight to your sponsor and ask her to tell the finance department to fund additional money to enable this server upgrade.

(3) You go to finance and speak to their director and ensure that the team understands the necessity for the upgrade and approve an additional budget allocation

(4) Raise a change request for server upgrade and setup a meeting with your sponsor and finance director to explain them the situation and come up with possible solutions

Ray is working as a project manager in an FMCG company. He has recently joined this company and has really made his mark by connecting & collaborating with people in his department. He is currently handling a big project related to a dry laundry tower refurbishment work. The tower is about 75 years old and needs refurbishments in places. Ray is well known for involving team members before arriving at decisions. Currently, he is in the collect requirements phase of the project and he wants to brainstorm and generate ideas regarding the possible options of the refurbishment work (repair, replace, restore). He calls in all of his team members in a room and encourages Each person silently generates and writes down their ideas. Then he writes down the ideas on a flip chart until all ideas are recorded. After that, he makes sure that each recorded idea is discussed until all group members have a clear understanding. Finally, all the team members vote privately to prioritize the ideas, usually using a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest. Which technique is Ray using here to collect requirements?

A project manager has recently completed a SAP deployment project for an MNC client. Next, the project manager confirms with the release manager that the SAP integration has been completed with all the departments of the organization in scope viz. Manufacturing, Engineering, Purchases, and Material Planning & Development. The QA team of the client has also verified the completed deliverables after completion of the last & final sprint. What is the next step for the project manager?

Any event or issue that can cause a risk to your project is called a project hurdle. Types of project hurdle vary based on industry, stakeholder, business environment, and the project itself. Arrange the definition of the following project hurdles with their names.  Note: In your PMP Exam, you will be required to drag & drop boxes containing the definitions to match the names

Hurdle Names:

(1) Impediment

(2) Blockers

(3) Obstacles

Definitions:

(A) Event or conditions that cause stoppages in the work or any further advancement

(B) Barriers that are movable, avoidable or could be overcome with some level of strategy and planning

(C) Situations, conditions, and actions that slow down or hinder progress but can be sorted out with some level of planning & execution

You are the sponsor of a telecom project. On a fine morning, you called in your project manager to review the project status. Your project is in the initiation phase now and your project manager is currently developing the project charter. You want to review the plan which consists of a documented explanation for creating, maximizing & sustaining the advantages for your project. Which project artifact should you tell your project manager to open?

You are a sponsor for an agile-managed project. You observe your product owner to be a quiet, perceptive and a keen observer. He is good at remembering details about other people. You have seen him best in a highly structured and consistent environment where he is given step-by-step instructions and clear expectations. Which MBTI personality indicator does your product owner most likely fall into?

An executive from the Product Design department occasionally visits your agile team’s work area to give new inputs on design. He is a critical stakeholder of the project but during sprint review, you as the Scrum Master find out that your team drops everything & starts working on new inputs as soon as it comes from this stakeholder. How should you address this situation?

You are a PM for an IT company and you have recently completed an application development for a client. But the client is still calling you/your team members to solve technical issues, troubleshooting and requests are still coming for small changes/upgrades. According to your 'schedule management plan' the client handover was an important task/significant event for your project which should have been completed on time. Which project artifact should have the baseline date of this event that will allow you to check how off-track you are w.r.t. your initial planned date?

You are a project manager for an agile-led project which involves the rollout of a new cloud-based employee appraisal system for Callum Inc. During the daily stand-up today, you are required to prioritize between the following critical issues highlighted by your team members. Please select your order of priority for the following from most critical to least critical:

Note: In your PMP Exam, you will be required to drag & drop boxes containing the options (1,2,3,4) in order of priority (most critical to least critical)

(1) The office server that would be routing the appraisal system access to the cloud has a limit of 500 simultaneous connections which is far less than your estimate

(2) Your team lacks a developer who has experience integrating local networks to cloud-based servers

(3) The hard drive which currently holds employee data is non-compatible with the cloud architecture for legacy data transfer and will need a patch upgrade

(4) Your team has not submitted the minutes-of-meeting from the last sprint retrospective

Clairemont Inc. is moving from a traditional project management methodology to agile-based project management. As a part of the training of the project managers within the company, Clairemont Inc. has assigned mentors who have established Scrum Masters to new project managers. During the shadowing process, the new project managers observe the scrum masters not as a 'boss', but as 'facilitators'. Their mission is to empower the teams, break barriers for them and develop their capability to build self-sufficient teams with a shared vision. Which leadership methodology have the Scrum Masters adopted here?

The sprint retrospective is a recurring meeting held at the end of a sprint used to discuss what went well during the previous sprint cycle and what can be improved for the next sprint. The Agile sprint retrospective is an essential part of the Scrum framework for developing, delivering, and managing complex projects. Arrange the stages of retrospective below in their correct order: In your PMP exam, you would be expected to drag & drop the choices in the correct the order:

A. Generate insights

B. Closeout

C. Gather and share data

D. Set the stage

E. Make decisions

Sam is the product owner for an Agile-led project which plans to roll-out a new tourist information application for the City of London. He is reviewing the quality control chart with the project team and scrum master. The response times have been going down over the iterations but are still above the upper control limit. What does this mean?

A project is in its execution and the Research & Development Team communicates to the Project Manager that the requirements and features for the product have changed following a market survey report published by the Consumer Behaviour Research Team. These changes were not anticipated and may affect the sales, and the overall project scope significantly. What action should the Project Manager take?

You are about to close an iteration cycle for an agile-managed project to develop a food ordering app. Suddenly, one of your developers mention that a feature that would have enabled users to view the cooking time of the ordered food in HH:MM format was missed from this iteration. On investigation, it was found that the design team did not provide the necessary input to the development team to enable the feature. What should you do as a project manager to prevent this type of situation in the future?

A project manager is managing a project of installing a new shampoo-making line for an FMCG company. The installation is complete, and the line has just started production. But, after a few days of production, it was identified that an important validation that was to be done to enable product dispatch was skipped. This resulted in a big hue & cry in the QA department and all the production which was done till date was put under-hold. The sponsor directs the PM to include this validation in the delivery plan immediately and revise the project schedule accordingly. What should the PM do first?

You have recently joined as a PM for the launch of an aviation turbine. The timeline of this launch is extremely critical since the date has been communicated to the media and the shareholders. The project is in the execution stage now and the test runs on the newly designed turbine is about to start. Now the design team has come up with a design change request to decrease the RPM of the turbine. You take this change request to the fabrication team and they mention to you that this request already came in 6 months back (this was before you joined this role) and was rejected. You go back to the design team again & they mention that it's not the case and this request is 'first-time'. You are now confused about who is telling the truth. Which is the best project artifact to find whether this request was actually proposed & evaluated 6 months back?

You are the project manager for the launch of an aviation turbine. The timeline of this launch is extremely critical since the date has been communicated to the media and the shareholders. You have analyzed the work that needs to be done and has come up with a list of activities. You consulted with your sponsor as well to identify any important milestone that you need to meet. What is your next best course of action as a PM?

You are the Product Owner for multiple scrum-driven projects in your organization. You do your best in terms of distributing time across each project and do weekly meetings with each of the CSMs. However, you are not available for day-to-day product development decision-making. Who could you plan to be your best representative during your absence?

Daniel has been assigned as a project manager in the middle of a project. He is currently in the process of taking handover from the previous project manager. He gets to know that the client is not happy with the performance of the project even if it is performing within the baselines. What should Daniel do as the immediate next step?

In a project, there has been a lot of misses on the quality deliverables. The sponsor has provided clear direction that quality is the key area of focus for this project from now on. A week later, a major outage on quality has come up again. What is the best course of action for the project manager?

Conflict management is the process of managing and assuaging the negative components of a conflict while increasing the positive aspects. Arrange the following steps of conflict management in the correct order for the most effective resolution: In your PMP Exam, you will be required to drag & arrange the following 5 options in the correct order.

(1) Analyze the context

(2) Determine the root cause

(3) Investigate the conflict

(4) Decipher the source & stage of conflict

(5) Implement and track solutions

Doniea has been assigned as a project manager for leading an agile-driven project in an organization that has been following the traditional waterfall model for over 30 years. The executives of the company are reluctant to embrace the new methodology and Doniea is struggling to have executive buy-in for her project to run smoothly. What actions she can take to overcome this issue (select THREE OPTIONS that apply)

Your project to develop an AI software to predict customer ordering behaviors on the McDonalds’ i-OS application needs a platform to collaborate with remote agile team members spread across different time zones. Spontaneous verbal and written communication between the team members must be supported. All the remote team workstations, Kanban Boards, and Burn Charts need to be visible at all times. Which virtual team collaboration application would be your most likely choice?

You are a PM for an NGO project for improving sanitation hygiene in a rural locality. The project is in the planning stage now and you are developing the project management plan. You have completed your PMP certification recently and you know that the project management plan defines how the project is executed, monitored and controlled, and closed. Your plan is waiting for baseline updates from cost and schedule before you send it out for an approval from your sponsor. At this stage, you receive an input from your civil engineer that the planned layout of the sanitation area will need to change since there has been an interference of that area with a future proposed highway construction. You are a bit concerned now. This will change the scope, and the time significantly. What is your next best step as a project manager now?

Joe is a project manager for a $10Mn automation project for a credit card company. He is PMP certified and very meticulous and detailed in every step of the process as outlined in PMBOK. He is in the scope development process and he called for a meeting one day morning to discuss the completion status of the scope development phase. His team member told him that they have completed the scope statement, WBS creation, and WBS dictionary. "OK, so since we have completed those three, I assume we have our ___________ in place now?"..... was Joe's question. Fill in the blanks

You are managing a Special Economic Zone construction project which is currently in the Initiation phase. You are liaising with the Govt. agencies to identify the cost buckets related to third-party taxation expenses. This will go as an input to your project management plan during the planning phase. What would you call this external factor that is influencing your project cost and eventually your project management plan?