Practising With Some Questions

This next section gives some questions to practise with in both Foundation and Practitioner formats. All the questions are to do with the Managing Product Delivery process, so you can have a go at them as you’re learning about this particular part of the method.

For the Foundation exam, remember that the exam itself, and the practice papers supplied by the Exam Board, will have questions in random order, not grouped by subject. It’s difficult to use the official Foundation sample papers until you’ve learned the whole method.

For the Practitioner exam, you won’t get a whole section on Managing Product Delivery. The process will be grouped with one or two other processes to make up an exam section. Typically, and predictably, Managing Product Delivery is grouped with at least the process of Controlling a Stage.

Foundation-level questions

Test your knowledge of Managing Product Delivery with these Foundation-level questions. Set your timer for eight minutes and go for it. You’ll find the answers and a bit of explanation at the end of the chapter.

1. Which of the following is a report produced in the process Managing Product Delivery?

a) Lessons Report

b) Checkpoint Report

c) Highlight Report

d) Work Package Report

2. Which of the answer options completes the following purpose statement?

The purpose of the Managing Product Delivery process is to control the link between the Project Manager and Team Manager(s), by placing formal requirements on:

a) The successful delivery of products to the required level of quality

b) The reporting of progress, spending, issues and new risks

c) Accepting, executing and delivering project work

d) The delivery of work within specified time and cost constraints

3. The activities of the process Managing Product Delivery cover the work of:

a) Team members

b) The Team Manager

c) The Project Manager

d) The Project Board

4. Which of the following activities of the process Managing Product Delivery covers the management of the required tests of specialist products?

a) Accept a Work Package.

b) Execute a Work Package.

c) Deliver a Work Package.

d) None of the above; it’s covered by an activity in the process Controlling a Stage.

5. What plan may be created in the activity ‘Accept a Work Package’?

a) Project Plan

b) Stage Plan

c) Exception Plan

d) Team Plan

6. If a Team Manager finds a better way of doing something and wants this reported as a lesson learned that will help future projects, what should the Team Manager do?

a) Submit a Lessons Report.

b) Make a note in the Lessons Log.

c) Report the lesson to Project Assurance.

d) Note the lesson on the next Checkpoint Report.

7. If a Team Manager calculates that the work of a Work Package will exceed the maximum time limit (tolerance) set by the Project Manager, what should the Team Manager do?

a) Report the matter as a ‘lesson identified’ when the Work Package is delivered, to help with more accurate estimation on future projects.

b) Send an issue to the Project Manager, unless some other notification procedure has been specified in the Work Package.

c) Do nothing until the next Checkpoint Report is due, at which point the details of the problem and the new estimated completion date should be put on record.

d) Do nothing for the time being, but try to make time savings during the remaining work to minimise the delay.

8. Which of the following are part of the objective of the process Managing Product Delivery?

A. To ensure that work on products allocated to the team is authorised and agreed

B. To ensure that accurate progress information is provided to the Project Manager at an agreed frequency, to ensure that expectations are managed

C. To ensure Team Managers, team members and suppliers are clear as to what is to be produced and what is the expected effort, cost or timescale

D. To ensure that any delays in executing the Work Package do not impact the agreed delivery targets of the stage or of the project, as set down in the plans

a) A, B and C

b) A, B and D

c) A, C and D

d) B, C and D

9. Which of the following is NOT an activity within the process Managing Product Delivery?

a) Accept a Work Package.

b) Execute a Work Package.

c) Review Work Package Status.

d) Deliver a Work Package.

10. During work on a Work Package, which PRINCE2 management product should be reviewed regularly by the Team Manager?

a) Daily Log

b) Risk Register

c) Quality Register

d) Project Brief

Practitioner-level questions

Have a go with these questions and try to do them in 18 minutes. That will be going at the same speed as the exam where you’ll have 10 questions in a section instead of our generous 12, but then about 15 minutes for answering them. So, read the additional scenario, then set your timer and go for it with the questions.

When looking to find out what is wrong with a sample product, it helps to glance first at Appendix A of the PRINCE2 manual to be clear in your mind how it should be. Then you have the contrast and you can spot many of the errors more rapidly.

Additional scenario

Please take into account the following additional project scenario information to supplement the main project information at the end of Chapter 2.

Extract from Work Package WP2-2 for delivery stage 2

1. Checkpoint Reports for this project will be produced daily.

2. Three teams are working in this stage, so there are three Work Packages – one for each team. This Work Package covers all the products being developed in the second delivery stage by the Works Team (Team 2).

3. The Checkpoint Reports for this Work Package will be produced by the Project Manager with assistance from Project Support, using information supplied by Team Managers and team members, including forward projections of ‘estimated time to complete’ for the work.

4. The five products in this Work Package will be worked on in turn by the team, and as each is completed it will be returned to the Project Manager, or completion notified by email.

5. This Work Package includes a copy of the Stage Plan covering this part of the development. Based on the Stage Plan, the Project Manager has also produced a series of Team Plans, each one covering the construction of a product in the Work Package. Team Managers should check the Team Plans when they first receive them to ensure that they fit the current staff allocations to their teams. They should also ensure that timescales are realistic and that the plan fits in with team members’ other commitments outside the project.

6. Any problems with the structural alterations when the new doorways are being made in delivery stage 1 may cause a delay in the start of delivery stage 2 and the work of all teams involved in the stage.

Warning: This information may contain errors

Answers to the Foundation-level questions

1. b. Lessons may be reported by a Team Manager, but this is done by putting them on the Checkpoint Report, not by producing a Lessons Report. The Lessons Report is always produced by the Project Manager in PRINCE2. There’s no such thing as a Work Package Report, and the Highlight Report is the progress report from the Project Manager to the Project Board, so is not created in this process, which is to do with the Team Manager’s work.

2. c. They all sound possible don’t they? This admittedly nasty question is to make the revision point that you need to be familiar with the purpose statements, not merely understand them. The key to knowing the correct answer in this instance is remembering that it’s the summary of the three activities that make up the process.

3. b. This is the only process that covers the work of the Team Manager.

4. b. When accepting a Work Package, no products have been built yet, so they can’t be tested. In delivering the Work Package, the products are being reported complete, so it’s far too late to start testing them. What if they fail a test?

5. d. It’s the Team Plan that may be created in this process. But it’s ‘may’, because Team Plans are optional.

6. d. It’s back to lessons learned, and again stressing that a Team Manager will report lessons in the Checkpoint Report. Team Managers don’t submit Lessons Reports, neither do they make notes in the Lessons Log, which is the Project Manager’s document. Project Assurance are primarily concerned with audit, not active project work such as collecting lessons. You’ll find ‘Lessons identified’ in the ‘This reporting period’ section of the Checkpoint Report. [Manual A.3.2]

7. b. Under the exception management procedure, projections that a Work Package will exceed the defined limits must be reported immediately. If not, why have limits? The whole purpose of them is to act as a reporting trigger.

8. a. The giveaway that statement D is wrong is that it’s describing stage and project control, which can’t be within the control of a Team Manager concerned with an individual Work Package. So the correct parts of the objective are A, B and C. [Manual 16.2]

9. c. Review Work Package Status is a PRINCE2 activity, but it refers to the Project Manager’s check of the Work Package as part of the process Controlling a Stage. It might have looked like a tough question if you weren’t sure of the answer, but then again there are only three activity names to remember for this process, so it’s not too unkind.

10. c. The Team Manager should be aware of what quality activity is needed on the products in the Work Package and be checking to ensure that those activities are being carried out. The Daily Log and Risk Register are the Project Manager’s responsibility, while the brief was left behind long ago when the Product Initiation Documentation (PID) was created. The Team Manager may also check the Risk Register, but this is not as central as the checks on the Quality Register, so ‘c’ is a better answer.

Answers to the Practitioner-level questions

You should have had some fun with the first six Practitioner questions, if there is such a thing as fun when revising for a PRINCE2 exam. The extract from the Work Package is all horribly wrong, and hopefully you’ll have found some of the possible answers entertaining as you looked for the right ones. The objective of these questions is to get you to focus first on what the product should be, as suggested in the ‘Remember’ note at the start of the section. When you’re clear on the right use of the product, then for each question it’s easier to filter out most – if not all – of the wrong answers, so that you quickly get to the right one, or at least reduce the field so you can focus in on a smaller number of possibilities. If you were really clear on the Work Package, you might have been able to go straight for the right answer to each question with limited attention to the other possibilities. It’s always worth a quick look at the other answers though, just in case one of them looks sensible and warns you that your first shot at the right answer may be incorrect and need checking.

Classic-style questions

1. E. The entry is incorrect because it relates to the whole project, not to this particular Work Package. The default in PRINCE2 is that requirements for Checkpoint Reports are set down in the ‘Reporting arrrangements’ section of the Work Package, so that requirements can be varied between one Work Package and another. For example, a high risk Work Package may justify more frequent reporting than a low risk one being done at the same time by a different team.

2. C. Paragraph 2 is a complete misunderstanding of the correct use of Work Packages. A Work Package is an instruction to build a product or a group of perhaps two or three products, if it makes sense to build them together and it’s the same team doing it. Work Packages are not written team by team, but product by product. Each team, potentially, may work through many Work Packages in each stage. [P2FD Ch7 Figure 7-2]

3. E. Again, a big misunderstanding of PRINCE2 is reflected in the paragraph. The Checkpoint Report is the regular progress report created by a Team Manager and sent to the Project Manager at the intervals specified in the Work Package – which may or may not be weekly.

4. A. More misunderstanding, and you should have identified this quickly because the statement runs counter to the three activities in the process. The ‘delivery’ activity is done when all the products in that Work Package are complete and have successfully passed the test (unless they have been approved off specification). The whole point of the Work Package is that it’s a single unit of work and may comprise one product or more than one. If there are several products in the package, they will be delivered, or reported complete, in one go at the end, and not individually. If delivery is to be product by product in sequence, then each product should be in its own Work Package.

5. B. Still more misunderstanding of the planning and control in PRINCE2. This Project Manager is clueless, was clearly trained by an inferior training company (not mine) and passed the exam by fluke (it happens), so you can be encouraged that there’s hope for you yet! The Team Manager produces Team Plans, normally on receipt of the Work Package, if they are required at all. It’s an option that Team Plans are produced at the same time as the Stage Plan, but this is not done independently of the Team Manager, as seems to be the case in the scenario paragraph.

6. C. The statement describes a risk. The Team Manager needs to know about risks and will look at the Risk Register as well as discuss these risks with the Project Manager. However, the Work Package does not contain risk information. There’s a good practical argument for saying that the Work Package should contain risk information, but at the moment, as Appendix A of the manual shows, it doesn’t. [Manual A.26.2]

It’s unlikely in the exam that you’ll get a set of questions based on a product that’s so completely wrong. This Work Package example, hopefully, gave you a bit of light relief in your revision and some confidence that you can spot errors because you know how PRINCE2 works in this area. It was also to break you out of any assumption that because one section of a product contains an error, the next one is more likely to be correct. If you think something is the right answer, then select it and don’t be swayed by thoughts that ‘they wouldn’t have set the questions like that in the exam’. Keep your focus on PRINCE2, not on any assumptions about how the paper may or may not have been constructed.

Assertion–reason style questions

1. D. The scenario information at the start of the question panel shows that the second statement is correct. The Team Manager should draw on that knowledge when constructing the Team Plan, but it doesn’t mean that the Team Manager should abdicate responsibility for the plan. It’s the Team Manager, not a team member, who owns the plan.

2. E. Rubbish! The team members are not part of the PRINCE2 project management team, and the Project Manager wouldn’t bypass a Team Manager. Equally, progress for the whole team is reported by the Team Manager with Checkpoint Reports. Progress is not reported by individual team members.

3. A. The Team Manager will indeed discuss the Work Package with the Project Manager, and the reason statement gives just two items from the list in the PRINCE2 manual. [Manual 16.4.1]

4. D. Problems are dealt with in the project not by consulting Quality Assurance, which is involved with standards in the organisation, not operational work in a project. If you’re a bit unclear on Quality Assurance, in terms both of what it is and how it differs from Project Assurance, be sure to check it out. [Manual 6.2.6, P2FD Ch12 Understanding Organisational Assurance]

5. E. More rubbish! The Checkpoint Report is a time-driven control, typically produced weekly, to notify progress while the work is underway. It isn’t used as a completion notification after a deafening silence throughout the work.

6. D. Did you read the question carefully? The question said that the testing responsibility ‘must always’ be given to the team member who creates the product. It’s usually the case that it’s better to have different people testing the product to the ones who created it. It may sometimes be better for the same people to both build and test a product, but that’s a judgement for a particular product, not a general requirement. Five areas of quality are covered in a Product Description, and the ‘quality method’ is indeed one of them.