People for PMP

Sample Practice Questions

1. Question 1

   In a newly formed project team, one experienced team member is overwhelmed by the complexity of the tasks and is not happy with the project team. What should the project manager do?
   1. A. Explain that the tasks are unavoidable and ask the team member to find a solution to overcome the challenges
   2. B. Set up team-building activities with the project team members to reduce tension
   3. C. Ask the team member to enter this potential schedule delay in the risk register
   4. D. Actively listen to the team member and identify ways to support their needs in completing the tasks
   Explanation

   The correct answer is: D. Actively listen to the team member and identify ways to support their needs in completing the tasks.

   The project manager's role here is servant leadership: remove impediments, support the team, and create the conditions in which people can do the work. Active listening is the specific interpersonal skill that lets the project manager understand the real cause of the person's difficulty rather than guessing at it. Only after understanding whether the problem is skill, workload, tooling, unclear requirements, or interpersonal friction can the project manager choose an effective support action such as training, pairing, or re-splitting the work, which follows the general principle of understanding the cause before acting. Because the team is newly formed, an individual conversation also builds the trust the team will need to move past the forming and storming stages. Telling the person the tasks are unavoidable and to solve it themselves abandons the team member and is the opposite of servant leadership. Team-building may help later, but the complaint is about task complexity and personal overload, not team tension, so it treats a symptom that has not been diagnosed. The risk register captures future uncertainty; an overwhelmed team member today is a present condition, and in any case the project manager should first understand and support, not just log something.

2. Question 2

   An experienced project manager is managing a multi-million dollar agile project. The project manager communicates the ground rules to the team, but after 12 iterations, the project manager starts noticing that some team members are not following the ground rules. What should the project manager do first to ensure team adherence to the ground rules?
   1. A. Ask the functional manager to replace team members not following the ground rules.
   2. B. Schedule a meeting with the project team to reinforce the ground rules.
   3. C. Notify the project sponsor about this behavior and ask the sponsor to take disciplinary action.
   4. D. Contact human resources to request a written warning letter be sent to team members not following the ground rules.
   Explanation

   The correct answer is: B. Schedule a meeting with the project team to reinforce the ground rules..

   Ground rules live in the team charter and are owned by the team, not imposed by management, so the correct first move is to bring the team together and re-establish shared agreement on them. After twelve iterations the rules may simply have drifted, or they may no longer fit how the team actually works, and a team discussion surfaces which it is. This keeps enforcement inside the team, which is exactly how a self-organizing agile team is supposed to police its own norms. The word first in the stem is also a strong signal: escalation and disciplinary routes are last resorts, not opening moves. Replacing team members is a drastic, punitive step taken before any attempt to correct the behaviour, and it destroys team cohesion late in a project. Sponsors are escalated to when the project manager has exhausted their own authority; behaviour inside the team is squarely the project manager's own responsibility. Formal HR warnings are a disciplinary last resort and bypass the team entirely, which is almost never the right first response.

3. Question 3

   A project manager is working on a complex project with a high degree of change. What strategy should the project manager use to ensure a successful project completion?
   1. A. Update the project management plan to reduce the possibility of scope creep.
   2. B. Schedule a regular risk review with the project management team.
   3. C. Increase the active engagement and participation of key stakeholders.
   4. D. Create a project change roadmap to keep track of all unforeseen changes.
   Explanation

   The correct answer is: C. Increase the active engagement and participation of key stakeholders..

   Increasing the active engagement and participation of key stakeholders is the right strategy because high change and high complexity mean requirements cannot be fixed in advance, so the control mechanism shifts from documentation to frequent human feedback. Actively engaging key stakeholders gives the team a continuous stream of direction, early validation of assumptions, and fast decisions when priorities move, which is what keeps a volatile project converging on value, and it is the stakeholder engagement principle in the PMI Standard: engage stakeholders proactively and to the degree needed to contribute to project success. It also reduces the biggest failure mode of complex projects, which is building the right thing according to a stale plan. Updating the project management plan to reduce the possibility of scope creep assumes change is undesirable, but on a high-change project change is expected and must be embraced through a process rather than suppressed. Scheduling a regular risk review with the project management team is useful but too narrow; it excludes the stakeholders who are the source of the changing direction. Creating a project change roadmap is a tracking artifact and recording change after the fact does not help the project respond to it.

4. Question 4

   During daily team standup meetings, team members constantly ask about which tasks they should focus on first. How should the project manager ensure the team is fully productive?
   1. A. Review the project backlog during the team's standup meeting.
   2. B. Encourage project team members to prioritize the product backlog.
   3. C. Ensure team members are working according to the project plan.
   4. D. Work with the product owner to ensure the project backlog is prioritized.
   Explanation

   The correct answer is: D. Work with the product owner to ensure the project backlog is prioritized..

   Ordering the product backlog is the accountability of the product owner, because prioritization is a value decision that requires business authority. Repeated confusion about what to do first is a direct symptom of an unordered or unclear backlog, so the fix is to address the root cause with the person who owns it rather than to patch it daily in the standup. Once the backlog is properly ordered, the top item is by definition the next most valuable thing to work on and the question stops being asked, and the project manager acting as servant leader removes this impediment by working with the product owner instead of taking the decision away from them. The daily standup is a fifteen-minute coordination and impediment meeting, not a backlog refinement or prioritization session. The development team does not prioritize the product backlog; it selects work from an already ordered backlog and decides how to build it. Falling back on the project plan ignores that in an adaptive delivery the ordered backlog, not a static task plan, is the source of what comes next.

5. Question 5

   A project manager has expertise in the technical domain. The project manager frequently demonstrates unacceptable behavior toward other team members; however, when confronted, the project manager denies this behavior. What is the reason for the project manager's behavior?
   1. A. The project manager lacks necessary empathy.
   2. B. The project manager lacks emotional intelligence (EI).
   3. C. The project manager was not properly trained.
   4. D. The project manager is in the wrong project role.
   Explanation

   The correct answer is: B. The project manager lacks emotional intelligence (EI)..

   Emotional intelligence covers self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness and relationship management, and the described behaviour fails on more than one of those dimensions at once. Denying behaviour that others observe is a self-awareness failure, and the unacceptable behaviour itself is a self-regulation and relationship management failure, so the accurate diagnosis is the broad one. PMI treats emotional intelligence as a core power skill precisely because technical expertise, which this project manager has in abundance, does not substitute for it, and naming the deficiency correctly matters because the development path, typically 360-degree feedback and coaching, follows from the diagnosis. Empathy is only one component of emotional intelligence and does not explain the denial, which is a self-awareness failure. Training addresses knowledge gaps and this is a behavioural and self-awareness gap that training alone does not close. Concluding the person is in the wrong role is a judgement about fit, not a reason for the behaviour, and it skips any attempt at development.

Other PMP domains

• Business Environment (58 questions)
• Process (406 questions)