Practising With Some Questions
Have a go with the following questions, which are in the exam styles. It helps if you can do them to time, but don’t be too tough on yourself if you’re still learning PRINCE2 and aren’t quite up to speed yet. Remember that while learning later parts of the method, you’ll be reinforcing the earlier parts – so your fluency should increase as the learning continues, and with that your speed of answering questions accurately.
Foundation-level questions
Set your timer for eight minutes and try these questions to check your knowledge and understanding of the process Directing a Project. Answers are at the end of the chapter.
Some of the answer options in this section include a short explanation, which, unfortunately perhaps, you won’t get in the exam. The explanations don’t give the answers away, but they should help if you’re practising with these questions while learning PRINCE2 and aren’t yet fully familiar with the whole method.
1. Which role is ultimately in charge of the project?
a) Corporate or programme management
b) The Executive
c) The Senior User
d) The Sponsor
2. What is the recommended frequency for Project Board meetings during a delivery stage to check progress?
a) Monthly
b) Weekly
c) At the frequency set down in the ‘Controls’ section of the Project Initiation Documentation (PID)
d) There are no regular meetings of the Project Board during the stages
3. In the event of the Project Manager being given conflicting instructions, whose instructions should he or she follow?
a) The Executive’s, as chair of the Project Board
b) The Senior User’s, as the role responsible for delivering the benefits
c) The Senior Supplier’s, as the role responsible for ensuring that the project is achievable
d) Project Assurance’s, as the role responsible for checking the running of the project
4. In the activity ‘Authorize Initiation’, which of the following would the Project Board use to support its decision on whether to go ahead and start the project?
a) Mandate
b) Project Brief
c) Project Initiation Documentation (PID)
d) Stage Plan for the first delivery stage
5. In which activity would the Project Board instruct the Project Manager to shut down the project prematurely, should that be necessary?
a) Authorize Initiation
b) Authorize emergency action
c) Give ad hoc direction
d) Authorize project closure
6. Which role is responsible for approving the Project Brief?
a) Executive
b) Senior User
c) Senior Supplier
d) All of the above roles working together
7. In which PRINCE2 process are the members of the Project Board appointed?
a) Starting Up a Project
b) Initiating a Project
c) Managing a Stage Boundary
d) Controlling a Stage
8. Which of the following is NOT an objective of the process Directing a Project? To ensure that:
a) There’s authority to initiate the project.
b) There’s authority to deliver the project’s products.
c) Corporate or programme management has an interface to the project.
d) The products being produced by teams are delivered to expectations.
9. What is the final phrase in the following purpose statement. To enable the Project Board to be accountable for the project’s success by making key decisions and exercising overall control while:
a) Maintaining a low degree of risk exposure
b) Ensuring that the benefits specified in the Business Case can be delivered
c) Authorising spending only within the agreed financial tolerances (limits)
d) Delegating day-to-day management of the project to the Project Manager
10. Which of the following is NOT an input into the activity ‘Give ad hoc direction’?
a) Highlight Report (the progress report from the Project Manager to the board)
b) Exception Report (referral of something projected to go beyond the Project Manager’s authority)
c) Issue Report (a report setting down the detail of an issue being referred to the board)
d) End Stage Report (a report giving the board details such as the final cost of a stage just finishing)
Practitioner-level questions
Have a go with these questions, preferably against the clock. In the Practitioner exam you’ll get 10 questions in a section and about 15 minutes to answer them. Here we’ve given you 12 questions to practise with so you can have 18 minutes. Generous to a fault huh? The questions in this chapter are all about the process ‘Directing a Project’ because they’re to help you revise this subject area. In the exam, however, you won’t ever get a whole section on a single process. Directing a Project will always be bundled with the two other processes Managing a Stage Boundary and Closing a Project.
Read the extra project scenario, then set your timer to 18 minutes and try to answer the questions within that time. If you’re near the start of your exam practice, don’t worry if you go a bit over time on the first few sets of questions that you tackle in these chapters. You will pick up speed as you get the idea of the question formats, which is why the book has lots to practice on.
There’s some extra project scenario information which you’ll need to refer to for some of these questions.
Additional scenario
The offices have now been cleared of staff and unwanted furniture, and work is about to begin on making the openings for the new doorways. However, on looking more closely at the plans, the manager of the new business unit has realised that one new doorway isn’t really needed. In fact, it would reduce wall space significantly, not just because of the doorway itself, but because of the space that would be needed to allow the door to open. Because the staff in that particular office can get to the other offices easily enough using adjacent doors in the corridor and the other new doorways, the wall space is more valuable than this particular new doorway.
The unit manager has asked the Project Manager to change the plan to have only three new doorways instead of the originally planned four. The Project Manager has put the details of this request onto an Issue Report and made an entry in the Issue Register.
Answers to the Foundation-level questions
1. b.The Project Board isn’t a ‘voting democracy’ and the Executive is ultimately in charge of both the board and the project. It’s a common misconception, particularly by Project Board members anxious to avoid both responsibility and blame, that it’s the Project Manager’s project. Project Board members, including the Executive, often think that they’re somehow an independent body who will attend meetings if it’s convenient, eat the free lunches and ask the Project Manager some awkward questions. Wrong! If you’re not clear on this, have a look at PRINCE2 For Dummies. [P2FD Chapter 12]
2. d. PRINCE2 uses ‘exception management’. If you haven’t learned about this yet, you may have got a clue having not seen any regular meetings covered in any of the activities of the Directing a Project process – or having read the earlier part of this chapter. Even stage end meetings are not regular in the sense that they’re not at set time-based intervals; management stages will be different lengths.
3. a. In a live project, the Project Manager should also usually tell the Executive about conflicting instructions, not merely ignore instructions which may be from managers who are very senior in the organisation. The answer here reflects a specific section of the manual which is to emphasise the Executive’s ultimate authority within the project, but remember that the manual is not intended to limit additional actions which may be sensible in the circumstances. [Manual 13.3 para 4]
4. b. The activity is to authorise initiation, so it’s before initiation. Therefore you should have been able to determine that the answer was the Project Brief. The mandate is left behind once the brief is created, and it’s the submission of the brief that comes immediately before the activity to ‘Authorize Initiation’ takes place.
5. c. The board would decide to close the project down prematurely in the activity ‘Give ad hoc direction’ and give the instruction to the Project Manager. The activity ‘Authorize project closure’ happens later, after the Project Manager has done the closure work covered in the process Closing a Project.
6. d. All of the Project Board roles approve the brief. Responsibilities in each of the activities are shown in the matrix at the end of each activity section in the PRINCE2 manual. [Manual Table 13-1]
7. a. The default in the manual is Starting Up a Project. The Executive and Project Manager are put in place in the first activity of Start Up, with the other board member appointments being made in the Start Up activity ‘Design and appoint the project management team’. You may feel that this isn’t a question about the process Directing a Project, but it’s to make sure that you realise that the board is in place before the process starts.
8. d. The objectives are listed at the start of the Directing a Project chapter of the PRINCE2 manual. [Manual 13.2]. Option d is actually from a later process, Managing Product Delivery, which covers the work of Team Managers.
9. d. The purpose statement for each process and theme is at the start of its respective chapter in the manual.
10. d. The End Stage Report isn’t ‘ad hoc’ but rather at the fixed points of the stage boundaries.
You may have noticed that the final three questions all had an answer of ‘d’. Remember that there’s no connection between the questions and that you may sometimes get a run of the same letter or a disproportionate number of answers over the whole paper with a particular answer letter. Always ignore previous answers and go with the letter that you think is correct, no matter how often it’s come up before.
Answers to the Practitioner-level questions
Assertion–reason style questions
1. E. The board is responsible for approving the whole Project Initiation Documentation (PID) and have no business asking for a ‘management overview’ to be put at the front of it or reading selected parts! The board is responsible for making sure that the project will run properly, and members coming up with excuses such as that they haven’t got time to read the PID are not acceptable. Imagine senior managers in a department claiming that they didn’t have time to read the departmental strategy and objectives document for the coming year. Even if Project Assurance checks some of the technicalities, such as that the benefits calculations are correct, the board must still approve the whole PID and must read all of it. The responsibilities information in the method quite rightly makes no provision for this being delegated.
2. D. It’s a common reaction to think that all issues must always go to the board. Remember though that the Project Manager has been appointed to manage the project on a day-to-day basis. If the Project Manager can deal with something and has the authority to do so, then he or she should get on with it without involving the board. Imagine what would happen in an organisation if every time staff members hit a problem or needed to make a decision they went to their boss! The senior managers of a department in an organisation can be responsible for that department without being involved in every single matter. They expect their staff to get on and manage most things and only involve the senior managers when it’s really necessary or for things where those senior managers have instructed that they should be informed and involved. So too with the project. The day-to-day work of the PRINCE2 Project Manager is covered by the process Controlling a Stage, and the activity ‘Take corrective action’ within that process covers the work of the Project Manager adjusting the stage within his or her delegated authority to do so. The nature and extent of that delegated authority will have been recorded in the PID.
3. A. The project can be closed at any time using the activity ‘Give ad hoc direction’. And the second statement is indeed the reason why the first is true. If a project is badly off track, then sometimes the responsible action is to close it down without throwing good money after bad on a failed project.
4. E. The Project Brief stops at the end of Start Up. Any new information is reflected in the PID, and the brief isn’t kept up to date. A check of Appendix A in the manual will confirm that the brief does not become part of the PID. Have a look at PRINCE2 For Dummies for more help on the nature of the brief and the PID. [P2FD Ch5]
5. E. The Project Manager can always refer a worthwhile change to the Project Board where it’s beyond his or her authority (because of budget or any other limit) to approve it. Neither is it the case that all projects must be contained within the original budget. If someone comes up with a great idea that will make huge savings in the organisation for a small increase in the project budget, then it’s highly likely to be agreed provided there are no constraints involved, such as time. Depending on the spending authority given to the board by programme or corporate management, the Executive may need to seek further authority above the level of the project. It’s important to take on board that PRINCE2 doesn’t prohibit change – even large scale change – but it does control it.
6. C. The Executive is responsible for the Business Case, so must check it at the end of the stage after working with the Project Manager to make any changes. However, it’s not true that all projects must show financial benefits. A project may be justified by being a compliance project, for example, where it’s being done because of an instruction from head office or perhaps to comply with a change in the law.
Classic-style questions
7. E. It would be sensible to check things out with the Project Board, and especially the Senior User, as the floor plan is a fundamental product in a project of this type. Note in this explanation the use of the word ‘sensible’. This is my judgement as the author of this book and the person who wrote the question. If you agree with me, then you’re right; you get the mark and your name goes up in lights. If you disagree with me, then you’re wrong; you’re the weakest link and you must take the walk of shame. Despite what you may think, I’m not on a power trip here but giving an example of a question which is a judgement call. In such cases, you hope that your view is the same as that of the person who set the question. Some of the possible answers are clearly wrong, but with the remainder it comes down to your judgement.
8. D. The possibility of a 25 per cent increase in funding is an important matter and should be put on record within the project. The point of this question is to reinforce that issues don’t just get referred ‘up’ to the Project Board but can be sent ‘down’ from the board to the Project Manager. In this example, it’s the result of inbound information coming to the board, and specifically the Executive, from outside the project. Anyone can submit an issue, and that includes Project Board members. The other answers are wrong, and some dangerously so. It would be an undermining of assurance, for example, to tell assurance staff to ignore cost overruns. That would be to abandon financial control. If extra things are added to the project to take advantage of the 25 per cent increase, then fine – but the financial management should still be there for that additional authorised work.
9. B. Of the options, B is the only correct answer. It could be that the Project Manager has sufficient delegated authority to make the decision, but that wasn’t one of the answer options. Of the others, A is incorrect because that would mean that useful change would be excluded when actually the project might benefit from it considerably. C and E would both introduce unnecessary delay. D represents a misunderstanding of the function of Project Assurance. Assurance is primarily an audit function to check things, not an active function responsible for making control decisions.
More classic-style questions
10. A and E. The Outline Business Case is part of the Project Brief. Accompanying the Project Brief when it’s submitted to the Project Board will be the Stage Plan for the Initiation Stage, produced in the last activity of the process ‘Starting Up a Project’. The strategies are produced in Initiation, which comes later, and Highlight Reports (progress reports) are generated during stages, not at the end of Start Up (the case here) or at the end of project stages. The point of this question is two-fold. First to make you think about where you are in the method, what has come before this point (Start Up) and what comes after (Initiation). Second, to make sure that you’ve taken on board the fact that the Initiation Stage has a Stage Plan, like any other project stage. That Stage Plan must be agreed before the stage starts.
Where a Practitioner question is about a particular activity, stop for a moment and ‘locate yourself’ in the method. Think where the activity is within the processes, who is doing it and when it’s happening. When you’re clear on that, it often makes it easier to sort out which are the right answers and which are the wrong ones, or at least to rule some of them out and so narrow your field of focus.
11. C and D. The board could decide not to ‘Authorize a Stage or Exception Plan’ and instruct the Project Manager to shut the project down instead. Also, at any time by using the activity ‘Give ad hoc direction’ the board could order the project to be closed down. In either case, the Project Manager would do an orderly shut down using the process ‘Closing a Project’ and then come back to the Project Board to ‘Authorize project closure’. An example of this ‘crash stop’ instruction is if Princess Projects Plc suddenly decided to outsource its e-commerce work and so didn’t need the new business unit accommodation prepared after all. The refurbishment work might then be put on hold until a new use was found for the office accommodation, which might then need a different layout. Option A is a wrong answer and is making the point that the project hasn’t started yet. The project starts with the Initiation Stage, not Start Up. B is incorrect because the project is already closed even though there are one or more post-project Benefits Reviews still to come. Option E is nonsensical when you stop to think about it. If the project is no longer justified, it doesn’t make sense to continue it.
12. B and D. The board (often the Executive) communications with corporate or programme management are covered by the ad hoc direction activity. D is the other correct answer because the Executive owns the Business Case. It follows that the Project Manager would consult the Executive when adjusting the Business Case. The need for this consultation is described in the manual in the context of the process Managing a Stage Boundary. If you haven’t learned the content that far yet, you may still have realised that the ownership element indicates Executive involvement before the formal step of approving the next Stage Plan. Option A is part of the work of the process Starting Up a Project. Option C is part of the work of Directing a Project but is covered by the earlier activity of ‘Authorize Initiation’. Option E involves Project Board work but with the activity ‘Authorize a Stage or Exception Plan’, not ‘Giving ad-hoc direction’.
So, how did you get on? If you got questions wrong but can now see why, then that’s great and a useful part of your revision. If you got questions wrong, and when you looked at the answers you said to yourself ‘Oh yes, of course,’ then you may be misreading the questions. In the exam, read the questions very carefully to be sure you’re clear on what they’re asking.