Question

1 According to the project plan, a contractor is scheduled to deliver some software components today afternoon. A regular payment is due to be made to this contractor tomorrow. You and your project team received a note this morning informing you that the software delivery will be delayed by 2 weeks. What should you do right now?

a You should delay the payment for two weeks

b You must immediately find a different contractor

c You should conduct a meeting with the contractor to resolve the delivery issues before making the payment

d You should make the payment and reschedule the project plan

2 What does the acronym RACI commonly stand for in project management?

a Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed

b Remote, Attached, Connected, Integrated

c Risk, Analysis, Caution, Initiative

d Randomly, Accessible, Cashflow, Information

3 You have used estimates made by your team members and applied the critical path method tocompute a network logic diagram for your project. Then you found out that it cannot be sufficiently optimized for scarce resources and fast progress towards a given deadline. What should you do next?

a Apply resource leveling heuristics to uncritical activities only.

b Reduce estimates on duration and work efforts by an adequate percentage.

c Apply Three-point estimation and critical chain project management.

d Remove physical constraints and replace hard logic with soft logic.

4 Liquidated damages (LDs) are contractually agreed payments in order to...

a ...give the contractor an incentive to meet an aggressive schedule or challenging quality objectives.

b ...penalize the contractor for late completion of a project or failure to meet specifications.

c ...cover the customer's costs caused by late completion or failure to meet specifications by the contractor.

d ...make a bid or proposal binding for the offerer while the customer has time to select among various bidders.

Answer 1

1. Answer: C (You should conduct a meeting with the contractor to resolve the delivery issues before making the payment)

Rationale: For any company, completing the project on expected time is really crucial. Any delays in the project can increase the cost of the company. Therefore, it is important for the company that it avoids the delays as much as possible and therefore, the compay must conduct a meeting with the contractor to resolve this issue.

2. Answer: A (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed)

Rationale: The components of RACI are:

• Responsible: This team member does the work in order complete the task and is responsible for it.

• Accountable: This person assigns the work and is the last person to review the task.

• Consulted: Every deliverable becomes strengthened by consultation from more than one team member.

• Informed: These team members simply need to be kept informed on project progress, rather than roped into the details of every single deliverable.

3. Answer: C (Apply Three-point estimation and critical chain project management)

Rationale: The accuracy of single-point activity cost estimates may be improved by considering estimation risk and uncertainty and using three point estimates to define an approximate range for the cost of an activity by using optimistic, most likely and pessimistic times for the activities..

The critical chain method (CCM) is a schedule method which allows the project team to place buffers on any path of project schedule to account for limited availability of resources and project uncertainties. It considers the effects of resource allocation, resouce levelling, resource optimization, and activity duration uncertainty on the critical path determined using the CPM approach.

4. Answer: C (Cover the customer's costs caused by late completion or failure to meet specifications by the contractor)

Rationale: Liquidated damages are the financial sum of money that are agreed upon by both the parties in a contract. These payments are made to the injured party in case of any breach of the contract.