4.4: PfMP style questions

Sample Questions

The following ten questions test the material from this chapter, mixing knowledge-based questions with situational judgment scenarios similar to what a real portfolio manager might face.

1. A portfolio roadmap places a component in Horizon 3 ("Later"). What level of planning detail should this component carry?
   1. Full work breakdown structure with locked resource assignments
   2. A directional strategic intent, with minimal architectural investment
   3. A definitive budget accurate to within 5 percent
   4. A signed charter with a named sponsor and fixed delivery date
2. Two components in the same portfolio, one pursuing near-total service uptime and another pursuing server consolidation for sustainability targets, are drawing on the same shared infrastructure. What is the best description of this situation?
   1. A scheduling accident that better planning would have avoided entirely
   2. A genuine strategic trade-off between two valid goals that governance needs to mediate
   3. Proof that one of the two goals should never have been approved
   4. An intradependency that can be resolved purely through technical decoupling
3. A portfolio manager notices every component passes its individual resource capacity check, yet the portfolio as a whole keeps missing deadlines due to a shared specialist team being overbooked. What does this scenario best illustrate?
   1. The components were scored incorrectly during selection
   2. Capacity checked component by component can hide a portfolio-wide resource collision
   3. The specialist team needs to be replaced with generalists
   4. The portfolio's stage gates are set too far apart
4. A team has plenty of available hours but lacks the specific regulatory and materials expertise a new component requires. Which quadrant of the capacity-capability matrix does this describe?
   1. High capacity, high capability
   2. Low capacity, low capability
   3. High capacity, low capability
   4. Low capacity, high capability
5. A governance board wants every resource across the portfolio scheduled at 100 percent utilization to maximize return on payroll. What is the most likely consequence?
   1. Improved efficiency with no meaningful downside
   2. Exponentially growing queue delays the moment any unexpected variability occurs
   3. A reduction in the need for contingency reserves
   4. Faster onboarding of new specialized hires
6. An initiative's top-down estimate was 4 to 6.5 million dollars. Six months later, a detailed bottom-up roll-up comes in at 7.2 million dollars. What is the most appropriate governance response?
   1. Cancel the initiative immediately, since the original estimate was clearly wrong
   2. Ignore the new number, since the original range was already approved
   3. Use tranche-based funding, portfolio reserves, and scope rationalization to reconcile the gap
   4. Discipline the team responsible for the original estimate
7. Why is reference class forecasting generally more reliable than asking a project team to estimate its own upcoming work from scratch?
   1. It removes the need for any contingency reserve
   2. It corrects for the tendency of teams to be more optimistic about their own work than history supports
   3. It always produces a lower estimate than bottom-up methods
   4. It eliminates the need for stage gates later in the project
8. A component manager inflates a bottom-up estimate in anticipation of an arbitrary cut from management. What is this behavior an example of?
   1. Reference class forecasting
   2. The padding spiral
   3. Tranche-based funding
   4. Flow efficiency
9. A mobile app team releases updates every two weeks, while the core billing system it depends on only releases twice a year for compliance reasons. What is the most effective governance response?
   1. Force the mobile app team onto the same twice-a-year release cycle
   2. Force the billing system onto a bi-weekly release cycle regardless of its compliance risk
   3. Establish a shared synchronization rhythm while letting each component keep its own internal cadence
   4. Cancel one of the two components to remove the mismatch entirely
10. Why is team-level story-point velocity generally a poor metric for portfolio-level governance?
    1. It is too expensive to calculate across multiple teams
    2. It isn't comparable across teams and can be easily inflated over time
    3. It only applies to waterfall-managed components
    4. It cannot be displayed on a dashboard

Answer Key

1. B. Horizon 3 components should stay directional and low-fidelity, since detailed planning that far out is likely to be wrong anyway.
2. B. Competing strategic goals sharing a resource are a genuine trade-off for governance to mediate, not a planning failure.
3. B. Checking capacity component by component can miss a shared resource being double-booked across several components at once.
4. C. Available hours without the required specialized skill describes high capacity paired with low capability, the busy-work trap.
5. B. Systems run at full utilization have no slack to absorb normal variability, causing wait times to grow exponentially rather than gradually.
6. C. A variance between top-down and bottom-up estimates is normal and should be absorbed through reserves, tranches, and scope adjustments, not panic.
7. B. Reference class forecasting grounds an estimate in how similar past work actually performed, correcting for a team's natural optimism about its own work.
8. B. Inflating an estimate to preempt an expected cut is the padding spiral, and it destroys the portfolio's real visibility into cost.
9. C. A shared synchronization rhythm lets each component keep the cadence appropriate to its own risk profile while still coordinating hand-offs.
10. B. Story-point velocity is specific to one team's own estimating habits, making it non-comparable across teams and easy to game over time.