PMP Exam Prep Activity Questions and answers 2022

Scenario: You are the newly assigned project manager in charge of a major software migration, which will require the updating of more that 7000 laptops across the employees in five states. Due to unique circumstances regarding this particular migration, a technician will need to visit each machine, configure settings, download and install updates, and run a series of validation exercises to confirm a successful migrations. One of the first things you will need to do is identify team members. Brainstorm the key skills that you will want in the members of this team. Key skills might include familiarity with the software to be migrated, experience migrating software solutions, customer service skills, the ability to create and execute a playbook to carry out a consistent process, the ability to maintain records and document actions, and troubleshooting skills. Scenario: You are the newly assigned project manager in charge of a major software migration, which will require the updating of more that 7000 laptops across the employees in five states. Due to unique circumstances regarding this particular migration, a technician will need to visit each machine, configure settings, download and install updates, and run a series of validation exercises to confirm a successful migrations. One of the first things you will need to do is identify team members. You will want to be able to validate that a proposed team member has the key skills you are looking for. What types of techniques might you be able to use to assess whether the team member would be a good fit? Pre-assessment tools might include attitudinal surveys, specific assessments, structured interviews, ability tests, and focus groups. 00:03 01:29 Scenario: You are the newly assigned project manager in charge of a major software migration, which will require the updating of more that 7000 laptops across the employees in five states. Due to unique circumstances regarding this particular migration, a technician will need to visit each machine, configure settings, download and install updates, and run a series of validation exercises to confirm a successful migrations. One of the first things you will need to do is identify team members. You will want to be able to validate that a proposed team member has the key skills you are looking for. You wish to establish a resource schedule for the project. What types of information should you include? Information might include how resources will be identified and acquired; the roles and responsibilities; the needed competencies; organization charts; training strategies and requirements; team development method to be used; and resource controls for the management of physical resources to support the team. Also, project team resource management, including the guidance on the lifecycle of the team resources-how they are defined, staffed, managed, and eventually released. And, finally a recognition plan detailing how team members are rewarded and recognized. Scenario: You are forming the team for migration project, and you want to help the team begin working through establishing its norms and defining how they will work together to accomplish the project objectives. You organize and initial team meeting. The team decides it should produce a team charter, but is unsure of exactly what it should cover. What are some the key areas that good team charter should include? The team should identify at least some of the following key items: shared values, guidelines for communication, use of collaboration tools, decision making approach, conflict management, when the team meets, shared hours, how the team improves. Scenario: You are forming the team for migration project, and you want to help the team begin working through establishing its norms and defining how they will work together to accomplish the project objectives. You organize and initial team meeting. The team realizes that it will regularly require interaction with other stakeholders who are not part of the team. What are some of the key considerations for interaction with them? Identify the stakeholders Identify their interest in the project Determine the appropriate communications method; Determine the appropriate communication frequency; Determine who on the team will engage with the stakeholder Determine how feedback from the stakeholder will be managed and aligned Creative effective visibility for stakeholders into project progress Scenario: You are forming the team for migration project, and you want to help the team begin working through establishing its norms and defining how they will work together to accomplish the project objectives. You organize and initial team meeting. Many of the team members have had poor previous experiences working in project teams due to lack of trust, politics, and lack of healthy team culture. How can you as the project manager create a healthy environment for your teams to perform successfully? Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing Talk through how the team will work together Decide how they will use collaboration tools Decide how they will work through conflict Scenario: You have been asked to help negotiate terms and conditions for creating a website for a client. While they have outlined a few of the basic needs of the project, they have yet to formalize any of the core deliverables. What are main sections of a deliverables agreement? What are the key components you would expect to see in each section? The core guidelines for analyzing the bounds of a project agreement. Scenario: You have been asked to help negotiate terms and conditions for creating a website for a client. While they have outlined a few of the basic needs of the project, they have yet to formalize any of the core deliverables. The client has a long list of requirements, and you wish to help them prioritize their needs to help identify a Minimum Viable Product and to provide a basis for organizing the work in a backlog. What are some of the techniques you could use to help them? Kano Model, Moscow (MSCW) Analysis, Paired Comparison, or 100-Point Method. Scenario: You have been asked to help negotiate terms and conditions for creating a website for a client. While they have outlined a few of the basic needs of the project, they have yet to formalize any of the core deliverables. The customer was hoping the project team would get their requirements for the website, go and build it, and then bring it back ready to go when it's finished. You counsel them that getting much more frequent feedback is critical to ensure customer satisfaction and to help identify and prioritize different requirements that may emerge during the project. What techniques could the team use to maintain effective customer engagement? Routine status reporting If agile, regular daily engagement with a product own and sprint reviews If traditional, more frequent feedback. Scenario: The project to produce a website is staffed by an experienced team, but the individual team members have not worked together. During the formation, the team may want to discuss how they will make decision, and how they may need to deal with conflict along the way. Describe how you would facilitate this discussion, and how you might capture the team's decisions in the team charter. Brainstorm different potential approaches to decision making, and to suggest approaches that have worked (and not worked) for them in the past. Scenario: The project to produce a website is staffed by an experienced team, but the individual team members have not worked together. The team wishes to use Agile Story Points to estimate effort. Given that this is a new team, how would you help them facilitate benchmarking so they can estimate effectively? Focus on similar types of work with which team members have experience. Of the team will have much better feel for this than trying to suggest something yourself, so encourage the team members to discuss their past work experiences on similar project and see if they can identify a useful benchmark. Scenario: The project to produce a website is staffed by an experienced team, but the individual team members have not worked together. What tools can the project team use to facilitate collaboration and promote visibility? Should be driven by a broader goal, ensuring stakeholder visibility and transparency for the team. For a traditional project, this might be found in the project Gantt chart; in an agile project, this might be the use of a task board for tracking and managing teamwork or even the use of standup meetings to ensure team progress and commitment. Scenario: The project to produce a website is staffed by an experienced team, but the individual team members have not worked together. Your team plans to have a retrospective at the end of each iteration to identify potential improvements in how the team is collaborating. While there are many, many techniques for running retrospectives, what are some o the key activities common in many retrospectives? Techniques like: 4Ls, Keep, Stop, Start, ESVP In the big picture, good retrospective should have a structure similar to this but may experience with alternatives. Basically, you need to se the stage, gather and share data, generate insights, make decisions, and close. Scenario: Your project is to produce a software solution for a branch of the U.S. military. Each branch as a distinct culture.,and as part of successful engagement with the client's stakeholders, team members need to be provided awareness training on the client's background, mission, culture, and expectations . What types of options do you have for producing effective onboarding training? How might you deliver it? How critical is it to provide this training early to this team? E-learning, instructor led, reading a cultural briefing. Scenario: Your project is to produce a software solution for a branch of the U.S. military. Each branch as a distinct culture.,and as part of successful engagement with the client's stakeholders, team members need to be provided awareness training on the client's background, mission, culture, and expectations . Training on the software solution needs to be offered to more than 200 customer stakeholders; fortunately, their needs are relatively similar, so only one set of training materials needs to be produced. The client has people at four sites, and will need to have hands-on practice in using the solution. What are some of the key areas of focus in planning this initiative? Planning for this initiative will be extensive, including at least identification of the required competencies, Gap Analysis and Training Outcome requirements, Training Delivery Method, Cost Estimates, Training Calendar and Resource Planning, Post-Training Mentoring Support, and Pre- and Post-Assessments and/or Certification. Scenario: Your team for the military software project is not co-located. Due to resource requirements and availability, you have three clusters of team members; one in Washington, DC, one in eastern North Carolina, and one in Kansas City, Missouri. Nonetheless, the customer expects the team to work effectively and collaboratively to meet their needs. Your team immediately begins exploring potential tools and technologies they can use to manage the project and its deliverables. What should the team consider before making decisions about virtual tool supports? Team planning and teaming agreements should precede decisions about specific tools. In short, the team should product its team charter first, and identify key issues related to collaboration that will exacerbated by not being co-located. Scenario: Your team for the military software project is not co-located. Due to resource requirements and availability, you have three clusters of team members; one in Washington, DC, one in eastern North Carolina, and one in Kansas City, Missouri. Nonetheless, the customer expects the team to work effectively and collaboratively to meet their needs. What are some of the tooling alternatives that the team could use to facilitate collaboration and communications? May include specific vendor tools available on the market. Shared task boards and burndown/burnup charts to promote visibility; shared messaging and chat board to enable quick ad hoc communications; knowledge repositories to store shared documents; and video-conferencing tools to create more opportunity for face-to-face collaboration. Scenario: Your team for the military software project is not co-located. Due to resource requirements and availability, you have three clusters of team members; one in Washington, DC, one in eastern North Carolina, and one in Kansas City, Missouri. Nonetheless, the customer expects the team to work effectively and collaboratively to meet their needs. Your team has been processing on the project for a month. now. The team is generally performing well, but you are looking to challenge them to identify areas where they can improve their collaboration and improve visibility. What ares some areas you may want to monitor to ensure your teams remain engaged and collaborative? Keeping project data up-to-date to help the other members maintain visibility. Listen for clues that team members are uncomfortable or not fully sharing blockers or other concerns. Encourage the team to use video conferencing and maximize the face-to-face collaboration. Strongly reinforce that these tools and meetings are "by the team, for the team" and that they are working together to maintain their commitment to their shared goals. Make your meetings count, time box them, and coach them to stay on track. Scenario: Your newly formed migration team is reviewing the documentation that is available about the project. The available documentation is pretty underwhelming; you have a general vision statement to migrate all of the laptops with the new software, a deadline date by which all of the work needs to be done. That's about it. To ensure you have the necessary buy-in, commitment, and resources required to make the project a success, you offer to assist them in creating a formal project charter. What should be included, and who should sign it? The charter should already be in place! The charter should include project's purpose, measurable objectives and related success criteria, high-level requirements, a project description, boundaries, and key deliverables, project risk, milestone schedules, pre-approved financial resources, key stakeholders list, project approval requirements, exit criteria, the assigned project manager and responsibility/authority level, and the name and authority of the project sponsor. Anything in the list that doesn't exist needs to be identified and agreed with the project sponsor. Scenario: Your newly formed migration team is reviewing the documentation that is available about the project. The available documentation is pretty underwhelming; you have a general vision statement to migrate all of the laptops with the new software, a deadline date by which all of the work needs to be done. That's about it. You have decided due to the rapidly changing nature of the project's requirements that you wish to run this project using an agile approach such as Scrum. Your team is unfamiliar with the agile ceremonies and want you to explain what they are and how they work. What are the agile ceremonies that need to be included? Sprint Planning Meetings, Daily Standups, Sprint Reviews, and Retrospectives. Scenario: Your newly formed migration team is reviewing the documentation that is available about the project. The available documentation is pretty underwhelming; you have a general vision statement to migrate all of the laptops with the new software, a deadline date by which all of the work needs to be done. That's about it. As your team is unfamiliar with agile, they are also unfamiliar with some of the agile practices for achieving agreement, estimation of effort, and creating a share vision of the solution they are trying to produce. What are some methods for achieving agreement? Examples may include Fist of Five, Roman Voting, and Consensus. Scenario: Your newly formed migration team is reviewing the documentation that is available about the project. The available documentation is pretty underwhelming; you have a general vision statement to migrate all of the laptops with the new software, a deadline date by which all of the work needs to be done. That's about it. What are some techniques for estimation? Planning Poker, and the use of T-Shirt Sizing, Modified Fibonacci, and other techniques to size the relative level of effort. Scenario: Your newly formed migration team is reviewing the documentation that is available about the project. The available documentation is pretty underwhelming; you have a general vision statement to migrate all of the laptops with the new software, a deadline date by which all of the work needs to be done. That's about it. What are some techniques for establishing a shared vision? The use fo a product vision statement, potentially the use of an XP Metaphor or Product Box, or the use of Brainstorming and Dot Voting to identifying and prioritize options.