| 1. | The answer is A. Although these are also three chapter headings in PMBOK, they are known together as the triple constraints. |
| 2. | The answer is C. Life cycle costing looks at the entire project and is a technique that helps determine the most cost effective ways of managing the project. |
| 3. | The answer is D. The planning of the engineering tasks to reduce cost, improve quality and maximize performance of the product is value engineering. Value engineering also helps to give clear data from which good decisions can be made. |
| 4. | The answer is A. There are other techniques used in general management to make decisions about use of capital. These techniques are two of them. |
| 5. | The answer is D. The costs of heating are not controllable by the project manager and do not occur because the project is begin executed. This makes them indirect costs. |
| 6. | The answer is C. Costs that are directly incurred because the project is being executed are directs costs. In some cases the project manager has control over the costs and in some cases the organization itself will control the costs. In any case, the costs occur only when the project is going on. |
| 7. | The answer is A. The earlier you have good plans from which to work the easier it is to control your costs and get good cost planning. If there is no clarity about the work to be done, there will be no clarity about the costs to be incurred. |
| 8. | The answer is D. This is the document where the Scope Statement is decomposed and will give you the task detail necessary to make resource planning possible. |
| 9. | The answer is C. If you have a task that is larger than this is terms of time, it is very difficult to assess resources needed to execute the task. You can certainly have tasks that are shorter than this; they will be useful for many of the resource planning activities. But you will not be able to plan well if the task is over 40 hours in length. There are too many unknowns in a task over the 40 hours to do good resource planning. |
| 10. | The answer is B. Historical information will not be the exact blueprint you need for your current project. People change, technologies change, situations change. All of these factors mean that although you can look at historical information as a guide, do not use it as your plan. |
| 11. | The answer is C. The basic definition of a project includes the fact that each project is unique. Something, often times many things, will be different between projects. So do not accept historical information as your final plan. It can guide you to get there, but it is not the final answer. |
| 12. | The answer is D. All three of these elements are choices you will have to make to successfully plan the project. |
| 13. | The answer is A. If you receive a list of resources, be sure you understand what they are and that you have a description in your mind that matches the description of the organization giving you the resource pool. For instance, the words "heavy duty" may mean different things to different organizations. Asking what the words mean, especially if the words are descriptions is something you should do for your own project. |
| 14. | The answer is D. The organization will often have policies that are used to determine how resources are selected. As a professional project manager you should make every effort to be aware of any organizational policies that will affect you resource planning. |
| 15. | The answer is A. The triple constraints of cost, quality, and time are always in play in a project. You must choose between the three constantly as you go through resource planning. You will probably not be the final arbiter of who to use or what equipment to use on the project because those choices will be made in organizational meetings leading to organizational policy. You should know that there are tradeoffs to be made between the triple constraints, and you should give good information to sponsors and stakeholders about your decisions in choosing resources. |
| 16. | The answer is C. If someone in your organization has been through a project similar to yours, that person can be an excellent source of information. In addition, that person will have the same constraints on him or her that you have and will have made decisions on resources based on those constraints. |
| 17. | The answer is B. The clearer you are concerning your own expectations and requirements, the better you will be at engaging consultants effectively. |
| 18. | The answer is B. The data are only useful to you when you know how they were derived. It is possible that one case in the data may be so far away from the average data that in fact the entire set of information is not truly useful. This would be the case when a very large company's data was blended in with several companies that were less than one tenth the size of the big company. Ask how the data were derived, and you can save yourself a lot of grief later. |
| 19. | The answer is A. You sum up the lower levels of the WBS to get the final number for the resources needed in the summary task at the top. |
| 20. | The answer is C. This is the estimate with the largest variance and is often the first budget done. |
| 21. | The answer is D. This is the final estimate you will use when executing the project. Although it is extremely difficult to create estimates that are this exact, it is a best practice to try to make the final estimate as close as possible to the actual cost. |
| 22. | The answer is A. This is the middle of the three estimates, and it gives a smaller range than the order of magnitude but a large range than the definitive estimate. |
| 23. | The answer is C. This is the directly from the PMBOK. |
| 24. | The answer is C. All three of these can be used to help estimate cost. |
| 25. | The answer is B. If the organization has a chart of accounts, the various estimates should be assigned to the correct category. |
| 26. | The answer is D. The occurrence of risks within a project will change the cost of the project. It is important for the project manager to calculate as well as possible the costs involved in managing the various risk events that might occur on a project. These costs are as critical as any of the other costs. |
| 27. | The answer is B. Analogous estimating uses previous projects as a benchmark for estimating cost. |
| 28. | The answer is C. This type of estimating looks at the large picture first and gives an overall view of the potential costs. |
| 29. | The answer is D. By starting with the lowest tasks and then rolling up the costs, you will arrive at the final cost estimate. |
| 30. | The answer is A. Parametric modeling looks at parameters specific to your project and measures the new project against ones that have been done in the past. |
| 31. | The answer is C. This is true because you start with a breakdown that gives you the most accurate cost estimate possible. |
| 32. | The answer is B. The first estimate that people see is often the one that they remember the most. Even if you explain the major caveat that you are simply showing a first estimate, it always seems that people remember the first information they receive. |
| 33. | The answer is B. Version control is a vitally important part of project management. No more so than in cost estimates. These documents must be kept under version control, and any changes to the estimate necessitate a new version number. |
| 34. | The answer is C. The cost baseline is the budget that will be your measurement of costs for the project. It is usually time-phased so that you can look at a specific point in time and measure how you are doing against the baseline for that particular time. |
| 35. | The answer is C. You should keep permanent records of every change made from the original approved plan. This is just as true in cost control as it is in any other type of control in a project. |
| 36. | The answer is C. You take the actual costs of the project and add the original estimate at completion to that number to get your estimate at completion. |
| 37. | The answer is A. You use a cost performance index to determine what your final estimate at completion will be. |
| 38. | The answer is D. The cost performance index is used in this case as an indicator of how the rest of the project will progress in terms of cost. This leads to an estimate at completion. |
| 39. | The answer is B. You take the actual costs and add your new estimates to that to get your new estimate at completion. |
| 40. | The answer is A. Earned value is the value of work that you have already done on the project. This is the concept that is not used in standard accounting and one that you will have to explain to management if you want to report using the earned value analysis technique. |
| 41. | The answer is B. The letters stand for "actual costs," which are the real costs that have been incurred during the project. Your accounting department may give this number to you. |
| 42. | The answer is C. You cannot recover sunk costs, as much as many organizations would like to do so. |
| 43. | The answer is B. Some projects are chosen because the payback period is shorter than on other projects being considered. |
| 44. | The answer is A. You can switch from straight line depreciation as your means of accounting to accelerated depreciation the next year, but you cannot do the reverse. |
| 45. | The answer is B. The better you are at framing the requirements of the project, the better the vendor should be in giving you a response. |
| 46. | The answer is B. Use the dictionary as a tool to look at detail in the overall project task system. This will help give you better figures for use in your cost budgeting. |
| 47. | The answer is D. You expect that there is a high probability that a cost will occur but you are not sure when it will happen. |
| 48. | The answer is A. EV = 8 and PV = 6, and the formula reads SPI=8/6, which is 1.33. |
| 49. | The answer is B. EV = 6 and PV = 8, and the formula reads SPI=6/8, which is .75. |
