205
Practice Test 2
This practice test is designed to simulate PMI
®
’s 170-question PfMP
®
certication
exam. You have four hours to answer all questions.
INSTRUCTIONS: Note the most suitable answer for each multiple- choice
question in the appropriate space on the answer sheet.
1. An important but often overlooked item that should be part of the portfolio
strategic plan is:
a. Organizational structure and organizational areas
b. Application of resources to components
c. Portfolio roles and responsibilities
d. A high- level timeline
2. While project management is becoming a standard way of working in many
organizations, its success requires portfolio management to ensure every
project in the portfolio supports organizational strategies. Portfolio man-
agement, however, requires a structure for effectiveness. In developing this
structure, a best practice is to base it on:
a. Availability of funding
b. Specic categories
c. Portfolio, sub- portfolios, programs, and projects based on organizational
areas
d. Specic portfolio management processes to be executed
206 ◾ PfMP® Exam Practice Tests and Study Guide
3. You are the portfolio manager for your chicken feed company located in
Europe. The company’s strategic goal is to be the market leader and to sup-
port as many poultry plants as possible. The company is striving as well
to acquire smaller competitors. The challenge is that with each acquisition
there are risks involved including review of competitor products, their
resources, and planned products. Your rm just acquired another company,
which means all the portfolio documents must be updated. Also, the port-
folio must be updated, and components reprioritized. You are working on
the risk management plan. You are determining the effect of changing three
factors in the portfolio so you are:
a. Rebalancing the components
b. Using trade- off analysis
c. Using sensitivity analysis
d. Estimating portfolio risk exposure
4. Assume your organization’s strategy is undergoing a major change as execu-
tives realized the existing dog food products it had manufactured for years
were no longer being purchased in the typical quantities, and it was losing
market share to the competition. The executives are changing to a new line
of products as well as entering the cat food market. Because of the new stra-
tegic direction, it is necessary to consider:
a. Employee morale
b. The need for an infusion in capital
c. Requirements for training and developing new competencies and skills
d. Key stakeholder expectations and communication requirements
5. Stakeholder analysis is critical in ensuring the stakeholders are part of the
portfolio process and also to ensure their information needs are met. Not to
be overlooked as one performs a stakeholder analysis is the:
a. Relationships among them
b. Frequency information is needed
c. Communication vehicles to use
d. Communications effectiveness
Practice Test 2 ◾ 207
6. Assume you are performing a prioritization analysis to help provide advice
to your Portfolio Review Board. To accomplish this analysis of ve possible
programs projects, and operational activities to pursue, your rst step should
be to:
a. Dene the portfolio roadmap
b. Compare strategic objectives
c. Identify dependencies between these ve proposed components and oth-
ers under way in the portfolio
d. Perform a strategic assessment
7. Working in the regulated food industry in a large dairy cooperative, among
your roles as the portfolio manager is to measure the portfolio performance
and especially to do so to manage portfolio value. The most useful tech-
nique is:
a. Earned value
b. Variance analysis
c. Trend analysis
d. Benets analysis
8. Your health information services and systems company recently won PMI’s
coveted PMO of the Year Award. The PMO has been in existence for eight
years and has focused on continuous improvement as it conducts maturity
assessments every two years. In the last maturity assessment, conducted a
year before submitting for the award, the consultants pointed out that many
portfolio management components were not aligned with organizational
strategy. The PMO Director, who has portfolio management responsibility,
realized that this meant:
a. The company’s workload had increased
b. A dened business case was needed for each component
c. Additional subject matter experts needed to be hired to augment the staff
d. A portfolio performance plan was a necessary rst step
9. Assume you manage your organization’s day- to- day activities in the mar-
keting department. Occasionally, though, your Department has a specic
project; one example is its decision to undertake a business development
maturity assessment. This situation shows you are then:
a. A member of the Portfolio Selection Committee
b. A project sponsor
c. Interacting actively with the Portfolio Manager
d. Managing relationships with other operational groups so this project
attains needed resources
208 ◾ PfMP® Exam Practice Tests and Study Guide
10. Assume you have categorized the various risks that could inuence the port-
folio. You want to determine the risk value to the overall portfolio. You want
to compare the risks without representing the interface between them and
present a graphical view for the members of your Portfolio Review Board,
and you know new risks will arise as strategic objectives change. To provide
these data, you prepare a(n):
a. Risk histogram
b. Inuence analysis
c. Heat map
d. Impact assessment
11. Assume your organization had a slight change in strategy as it acquired a
minor, small competitor with similar product and service offerings. This
acquisition in essence adds resources to your company, but its products may
have a few different features than those your medical device and health
services company offers. As the portfolio manager, you performed a gap
analysis to best manage strategic changes and to review the component mix
in the portfolio. You then reviewed the portfolio roadmap and decided to
update it because of changes to the:
a. Management approach
b. Priorities
c. Components
d. Risks
12. Recently, you were appointed as the portfolio manager for the county
government. You were pleased you were selected for this opportunity.
Previously in your work as a project manager and then as a program man-
ager, you found a charter to be especially useful and plan to prepare one for
your work in portfolio management. It should contain:
a. The high- level timelines for portfolio delivery
b. The prioritization criteria
c. Key assumptions, constraints, and dependences
d. A list of portfolio benets
Practice Test 2 ◾ 209
13. After realizing the organization’s traditional methods of managing its pro-
grams and projects were too cumbersome and receiving complaints from
customers that the deliverables did not meet their expectations or were late,
your executive team decided to make some changes. They established a
PMO and also had an external consultant review the existing procedures
and simplify them. Now, staff members require training in them, and it
seems as if with the simplied methods, some staff will be under- allocated.
As the portfolio manager, you believe the executive team would nd it use-
ful for you to prepare:
a. Financial investment reports
b. Customer satisfaction surveys
c. Resource histograms
d. Resource proles
14. Your manufacturing company focuses on a policy of ‘zero defects’. However,
for it to remain the market leader in its production of metal hip replace-
ments, it has invested in a number of tests to ensure that once the product is
delivered, defects are not present, leading to less rework and on time deliv-
ery. Since rework previously was the norm, and many claimed the previous
product line led to injury, the company decided to focus on root- cause
analysis as a way to identify problems and determine solutions. It used focus
groups to involve a representative number of people from a variety of areas
in the plant. Such an investment in quality:
a. Demonstrates management commitment to the components in the
portfolio
b. Is viewed as a positive risk
c. Is a way to reduce overall life cycle costs
d. Involves everyone in the process
15. Recognizing the overload on the electrical power grid system in your coun-
try and the numerous outages that occur in metropolitan areas, you have
been tasked by the Department of Energy to serve as its portfolio manager
and to set up detailed identication, categorization, ranking, and scoring
criteria. You found that an especially useful document to assist you was the:
a. Department’s strategic plan
b. Portfolio strategic plan
c. Portfolio charter
d. Portfolio roadmap
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