PMP Stakeholder Management

What is the purpose of a project charter?

• To formally authorize a project or a phase and document initial requirements which satisfy the stakeholder’s needs and expectations.
• To document how the project will be planned, executed, monitored/controlled, and closed.
• To link the project, which is going to be planned, executed, and
  monitored/controlled to the ongoing work of the organization.
• To describe the process of performing the work defined in the project management plan in order to achieve the project’s objectives.

The communications management plan is a document which includes descriptions of:

• Project level performance reports
• Activity level status reports
• Stakeholder communication requirements
• Responsibility assignments

As the project manager, you decided to arrange a team meeting to identify and analyze lessons learned from quality control with stakeholders. What should you do with them?

• Document them and make them part of the historical database for the project and the performing organization. 
• Discuss them with management and make sure that they remain otherwise confidential.
• Publish them in the corporate newsletter. 
• Follow your strategic decisions, independent from lessons learned. These decisions have been made and should be implemented whatever the outcomes are.

As the project manager in a software project which is currently initiated, you want to assess high-level risks. What should you do?

• Develop the project charter and a risk management plan to start identifying risks based on those and other documents.
• Identify and analyze risk events using qualitative and quantitative techniques.
• Develop contingency plans and fallback plans in case the original plan proves wrong.
• Discuss the risks documented in your Risk register with the project key stakeholders.

You have just taken over as manager of a project that will create many benefits for the performing organization, but you sense a high level of resistance in various stakeholders right from the start. What is the most appropriate action to resolve the problem?

• Develop a responsibility assignment matrix (RAM) which clearly shows the responsibility of each stakeholder for the various project activities and who needs to be consulted and informed. 
• Develop an organization diagram, which places each of the stakeholders at an appropriate position inside the project and allows for certain lines of communication while disallowing others.
• Schedule a meeting with these stakeholders to present the project, discuss and establish ground rules, ensure their involvement and identify initial personal and organizational issues.
• Do not talk to these stakeholders too much at this time, instead create faits accomplis, which will later force the stakeholders to support the project due to a lack of alternatives for them.

You are in the process of planning a project and found that stakeholders often have varying objectives and requirements. This makes it hard to come up with a plan with which all objectives will be met. What is probably most helpful to ensure common understanding?

• Ask the project stakeholders to build focus groups in order to discuss and remedy conflicting interests.
• Create an exhaustive document describing your point of view and ask stakeholders to review it.
• Let each stakeholder write a statement of work, merge the documents to a project scope statement.
• Use your authorization as the project manager to clearly prioritize the different objectives.

Your management announced that they want to put you on a stretch assignment. In this situation, you should consider that...

• ...a stretch assignment is going beyond your qualifications right from the start. Whatever your education, knowledge and skills are, you cannot fail personally. Congratulations.
• ...key stakeholders must have timely and complete information regarding your qualifications to make decisions regarding your suitability for the assignment.
• ...stretch assignments bear an increased risk of failure, and this is rarely outweighed by the learning and development experience expected to come with the assignment.
• ...you should avoid the increased hassle coming with the assignment. It will not be enough for you to simply satisfy requirements and achieve objectives. You will have to learn a lot. 

You took over a customer project for your company. From the inputs available, including contract, statement of work and project charter, you have developed a project management plan. You already presented that plan in a meeting with key stakeholders including your project sponsor and some representatives from the customer organization. During the meeting you sensed a high level of dissatisfaction by the customer executives, who signaled that the project might not produce the results that their company had expected. In your understanding, all necessary actions have been planned to meet the customer’s requirements. What should you do next?

• Request a written statement from the customer detailing the requirements which they believe are not addressed by your plan. Use this statement to update the project plan.
• Arrange meetings with the customer to identify their needs, wants and expectations for the project. Then create a narrative Scope statement from this information to document the agreed upon project scope.
• Request a formal meeting on top executive level to get the misunderstandings sorted out, then arrange a change request, re-plan your project where necessary and go ahead with the project work.
• Do not over-react. Performed according to your plan, the project will produce a convincing product for the customer. As soon as the executives will see it, they will probably change their opinion and accept it.

As a project manager you can assign any one of two team members to a highly coveted task. Both are equally capable, but one of them is a member of your in-group. To the other one, you have far more distance. How should you behave?

• You disclose the situation to stakeholders and solicit a joint decision.
• You take the person not in your in-group to avoid misunderstandings.
• Chose the in-group person. The trustful relation will benefit the project.
• You delegate the decision to a third team member to avoid the conflict.

What is true for the process of scope validation?

• Insufficient documentation is not a reason to reject deliverables, as long as in all other respects they are built according to specifications agreed upon.
• The project team members must achieve acceptance of the deliverables. This process is coordinated and documented by the project management team.
• It is the project management team’s responsibility to obtain stakeholder’s formal acceptance of the completed project scope and deliverables.
• Formal acceptance will finally reconcile all inconsistencies among deliverables and documents that where caused by bad change control and scope creep.