Quiz 3 Project Management Planning & Executing

Recently, you promoted your star programmer, Sam, to lead the agile development team. Sam was a fantastic software coder, and you thought the promotion would mean that he could now share his expertise with the other development team members. However, you are surprised to learn that the performance of Sam in his new role is not meeting your expectations.

Which empirical rule did you forget while considering the promotion of Sam?

• Expectancy theory

• Halo effect

• Pareto concept

• Murphy's law

While reviewing your project's performance, you discover a significant variance. If the issue is not fixed before the next customer inspection, your project might be canceled. However, after a further review conducted by the project team, you are glad to hear that bringing the project back on track requires only a minor correction to a configuration element.

What should you do first?

• Implement the corrective action

• Submit a change request

• Consult the project sponsor

• Delay the customer inspection

You are conducting a sprint retrospective in accordance with the communications management plan. The development team members want to try pair programming as they believe it will improve productivity by reducing rework. Even though you are very skeptical, you agree to implement the practice as you want to empower the team to be a self-managing unit.

What should you do next?

• During the upcoming sprint, measure velocity and, if it decreases, discontinue pair programming and reprimand the team members

• Invite the project sponsor and other key stakeholders to demonstrate the increased collaboration between the project team members

• Submit a change request to update the communications management plan with the new agile practice of pair programming

• At the end of the upcoming sprint, revise the burndown chart, evaluate the productivity, and update the lessons learned register

The organization's leadership wants projects to include more agile methodologies.

Before mandating any agile methods to be used in a project, what should be done first?

• Pause current projects to align them to the new agile cadence

• Ask employees to vote on who wants to take part in agile projects

• Assess organizational culture and readiness for the transformation

• Provide agile training to those who will be part of the pilot project team

As the project manager, you are leading a brainstorming session with key stakeholders to identify project risks. Once the project risks are determined, you immediately proceed to nominate different team members as risk owners and assign them the task of developing individual risk response plans.

Have you properly conducted risk management planning?

• No, you should be the one developing the risk response plans as you are ultimately responsible for the outcomes of the project.

• Yes, the risk response plans are an output of the Identify Risks process and should be developed right after the risks have been identified.

• No, before assigning risk responsibility to team members, you need to assess each risk's probability of occurrence and its impact.

• Yes, the team members should be assigned responsibility for a risk as soon as possible and tasked with creating a risk response plan.

Your company was awarded a contract that includes a 10% bonus payment if the project is completed two months early. You consider several options to exploit this opportunity.

What is the best course of action for you to increase the chances of receiving the bonus?

• Reduce project scope

• Level resources

• Crash the schedule

• Purchase insurance

During a bidder conference, a supplier asks why a section is missing from the request for quotation (RFQ). Upon realizing that the section is indeed missing, the project manager becomes flustered and stumbles through a brief reply. When the seller responses were received, all but three prospective suppliers fail to address the missing section.

What is the best course of action?

• Hold the bidder conference again, and explain the importance of the point that was initially missed

• Select from the three vendors that submitted complete proposals

• Send a revised RFQ to all prospective suppliers and allow them the opportunity to resubmit their proposals

• Extend the deadline and allow all of the vendors to resubmit their proposals

You are developing the risk management plan for your project. In support of this process, you need to determine the acceptable level of overall project risk exposure.

What should you do first?

• Determine the risk appetites of key project stakeholders

• Consult the risk exposure register within the organizational process assets

• Facilitate a brainstorming meeting to develop a comprehensive list of project risks

• Develop a set of responses to individual project risks to mitigate overall project risk

You are leading a project to build an oil pipeline in a foreign country. You want to outsource some of the construction work to local contractors and are in the process of preparing the bid package for prospective sellers.

Which of the following documents would you leave out of the package?

• Request for proposal

• Statement of work

• Independent cost estimates

• Bid documents

A team member volunteered to provide the project status update in a weekly presentation to the key stakeholders. After the first meeting has taken place, feedback from the stakeholders suggests that the presentation was not very engaging.

What is the best way for the project manager to address this situation with the team member?

• Discuss the issue with the team member

• Prepare a formal written document

• Utilize formal verbal communication

• Send an email to the team member