PMP practice questions, with answers.

Question 1A six-person team is joined by two more people. By how many does the number of two-way communication channels increase?

1. 2
2. 28
3. 11
4. 13

Question 2A project manager responds to rising coordination overhead on a nine-person team by adding a second daily stand-up and a shared mailbox everyone monitors. Overhead increases further. What did the response overlook?

1. Nine people is beyond the size at which any coordination mechanism helps.
2. Both additions maintain every existing path rather than reducing how many need maintaining.
3. Stand-ups are only effective for teams of seven or fewer.
4. A shared mailbox should have replaced the stand-ups rather than supplementing them.

Question 3A project acts on eleven of nineteen suggestions from a user group but never tells the group which were adopted. Submissions in the following round drop by two thirds. What best explains the drop?

1. The second round was probably scheduled too soon after the first.
2. Eleven of nineteen is too low an adoption rate to sustain engagement.
3. The group had exhausted its suggestions in the first round.
4. The group cannot distinguish acted-upon suggestions from ignored ones, so contributing appears futile.

Question 4During a requirements session a business analyst nods frequently, takes detailed notes, and asks two clarifying questions. Which additional behaviour would give the strongest evidence that he has understood the stakeholder correctly?

1. Asking further clarifying questions until the stakeholder has nothing to add.
2. Summarising the requirement back and asking the stakeholder to confirm or correct it.
3. Recording the session so the wording can be checked later.
4. Circulating his notes after the session for review.

Question 5A report states that 90% of planned tasks are complete. The steering group asks what that means for the launch date. Why can the report not answer the question?

1. Launch dates cannot be forecast from progress data in any case.
2. Percentage complete should be weighted by effort rather than by task count.
3. It counts tasks without saying what the remaining 10% contains or what depends on it.
4. The reporting period is too long to support a date forecast.

Question 6A delivery manager doubles a team's developers after complaints about slow delivery. Three months later output is unchanged and the queue of finished-but-unreviewed changes has grown. One senior engineer performs all reviews. What went wrong?

1. Review is being performed too thoroughly and the standard should be relaxed.
2. Capacity was added upstream of the constraint, so more work now waits at the same point.
3. Doubling a team at once is too large a change to absorb.
4. The new developers have not yet reached full productivity on the codebase.

Question 7A schedule assumes any of six engineers can perform a specialised migration task, and plans on the team's average productivity. Only two have done this kind of migration. What is the effect on the plan?

1. It overstates total team capacity by two thirds.
2. It has no practical effect, since the other four can be trained during the task.
3. It hides a dependency on two named people that levelling will not respect.
4. It understates the duration by exactly the ratio of experienced to total staff.

Question 8A team completes 10 items a fortnight and holds an average of 20 items in progress. A second team completes 10 a fortnight with 5 in progress. What differs between them?

1. The first team is four times more productive per person.
2. The first team's items take four times as long to emerge, at identical throughput.
3. Nothing meaningful; both deliver the same number of items.
4. The second team has spare capacity that could be used to raise throughput.

Question 9Resource demand exceeds supply in two overlapping months, and the project's finish date is contractually fixed. Which technique applies, and what is its limitation here?

1. Either, since both preserve the finish date by definition.
2. Smoothing, which redistributes work within existing float and fails if float is insufficient.
3. Levelling, which resolves the conflict by extending the finish date.
4. Neither, since a fixed finish date rules out schedule adjustment entirely.

Question 10Building a fraud-scoring engine internally would cost more than licensing one. The organisation expects fraud scoring to become central to how it competes over the next decade. What does this change about the make-or-buy decision?

1. It settles the decision as build, since core capabilities are never licensed.
2. It shifts the decision to procurement, as the licensing arrangement is now long-term.
3. Nothing — cost comparison is the basis for make-or-buy decisions.
4. Strategic control becomes a weighted factor, since the capability will outlive the project.