PfMP Sample Questions Answers

Your State Governor is fiscally conservative and has limited significantly the financial resources to be provided to each University in the eight Universities in the State's system. Recognizing your University is going to have a 55% reduction in its budget, your Chancellor is re-evaluating all the work that is under way to see how much it can do with fewer resources. Every department will have layoffs at all levels. However, the University does have a portfolio management process in place, which people support. This means for effective portfolio management:

Because of the ongoing and iterative nature of portfolio management, the processes in it are continually repeated as new components are added, and others are completed or terminated. Revisions are constant given complexity, risks, and the rate of change. As you work to optimize the portfolio, it is helpful to:

Assume you are a functional manager in your medical device company in research and development. Your scientists have determined a new product that will be a breakthrough for the company, and you want to serve as the sponsor for this component and present it to your Portfolio Review Board. You will need resources from other parts of the company to commercialize it. As you prepare your proposal you are following the key descriptors set up by the portfolio staff and will include:

As you are the portfolio manager for your state government agency, which is undergoing a series of budget cuts, you are focusing attention on managing risks to the portfolio as the budget is reduced. You realize in this process the time and budget for risk management also will be reduced; these data are in the:

You have been assigned as the manager for a major transformation portfolio in your company. You have a new direction in sight and you need to work with the team to attain the end goal and achieve the expected strategy. You are managing the strategic change and using multiple tools and techniques. What are they?

Multiple communication methods are used by the portfolio manager in order to proactively convey messages and engage the stakeholders at the right time and in the right manner. Which tool is used to visually convey multiple messages at the same time?

The portfolio undergoes a lot of changes through the portfolio life cycle, and the state of the portfolio changes on the go. Some components are terminated, other are added and initiated. When it comes to the authorize portfolio process, which of the following represents the state of the portfolio

You are the portfolio manager for a large county that comprises much of a major city in your country. The city also has a portfolio manager, and often you meet to discuss proposed initiatives to see if there are any dependencies. In your county, you established an approach to evaluate portfolio components to make judgments regarding their alignment and priority. In doing so, which of the following was especially helpful:

Efficiency is highly regarded when managing a portfolio and spans all activities i.e. risk management, communication management, etc. A portfolio is considered efficient if it

Review the following graphic. Assume now your portfolio is only 12% likely to meet is target of $41,000. Your Portfolio Review Board is dissatisfied in your management of the value of the overall portfolio. You explain the current mix of components is too risk adverse, and additional investment is required. The Board Chair then wants the needed investment to have a 75% likelihood, and you state it is:

One of the junior portfolio managers learned that she needs to use the roadmap as an input to the portfolio management plan development. She does not understand why, and she came to you for advice. What is your advice to her?

comes to this type of organizations, which of the following statements is true?

Assume you work in a weak matrix structure in your pharmaceutical company in which most of the program and project managers are coordinators, and most of the staff that supports them are in functional organizations. On some high priority programs, staff may be dedicated to the program full time for a short time period; however, operational work often takes precedence especially in manufacturing. The demand for some of the pharmaceutical products often outpaces the available supply, and shelf life is short. These fluctuations of resources then:

A key role for portfolio management is to balance the use of resources following the need against the existing skill-set. One of the component managers told you that an important SME on his program is traveling and there is no replacement for her. This will cause a major delay in the program. What is your first step as a portfolio manager?

You are managing a complex portfolio with high risk levels due to emerging technological breakthroughs and a short benefit window to market your product. You know that managing risks is key to success, and you are coaching your team on the same. While planning for risk management, multiple investment choice tools are used as part of the quantitative and qualitative analyzes. Which of the following tools determines the effects of portfolio velocity?

Your organization has a defined portfolio management process that it has followed for three years. As the portfolio manager, you keep your various plans up to date, and because of numerous regulatory changes involving the telecom industry, it is time to review and update the risk management plan. You have several key stakeholders working with you as you realize the importance of this plan in maintaining a competitive advantage. One way you and your team are assessing the various risks that may impact the structure of the portfolio is to use:

You are managing a portfolio for your company and are trying to balance the tasks that will be done internally based on the availability and the ones that will be outsourced. Managing supply and demand is a recurring activity in the portfolio life cycle and results in changes in resource utilization and resource efficiency. Which of the following are considered inputs to the Manage Supply and Demand process?

Initiatives in the companies aim to deliver values. For a portfolio, the value is delivered through a mix of components with similar strategic goals and objectives. Multiple components can contribute in the realization of the same organizational value. While managing the portfolio value, how do you depict the relationships between components in achieving value?

You have been recently assigned to manage a new portfolio that is supposed to shift the company from silo-based to a projectized one. You are in the process of initiating the portfolio. You are currently developing the strategic plan. Upon finishing it, you are expected to present

You have been asked to be the manager for a governmental portfolio, and your starting point should be tendering a strategic plan to the board for validation and approval for continuation. Which documents/artifacts do you have debuting the portfolio that you can use to develop the strategic plan?

Risks are very important to manage in portfolio management and organizations can choose to embrace risks with the potential of high rewards. As a portfolio manager, planning and managing risks is important. Risks are categorized in order to ease the process. Which of the following are considered as risk categories that a portfolio manager can use?

Assume you have determined the prioritization criteria your Portfolio Review Board will use, and you have reviewed the criteria with your key stakeholders to attain their buy off and occurrence. The purpose in establishing these criteria is to:

You have already created portfolio scenarios (what-if analysis) by reviewing components against prioritization criteria and using analysis techniques (e.g., options analysis, risk analysis, SWOT analysis, financial analysis). You now want to recommend portfolio scenario(s) and related components, based on prioritization analysis/criteria. You are doing this in order to

When managed correctly, the balanced scorecards can change the way an organization does business. Balanced scorecards keep focus on results. As a portfolio manager, you know that the purpose of using the balanced scorecards is

As you prepare your communications management plan you realize that stakeholder requirements may change over time, and these changes then will need to be reflected in updates to the plan. As the plan defines the overall communication process not only for gathering information but also in determining recipients of it, it also:

As a portfolio manager you need to continuously balance the need and requirements with the available resources to maintain a balanced portfolio and portfolio resources in order to optimize delivery. One of your key stakeholders came to you asking to skip the manage supply and demand process as you have already prioritized and allocated resources through the strategic management and the governance processes. As a portfolio manager you should

You are managing a complex portfolio with high risk levels due to emerging technological breakthroughs and a short benefit window to market your product. You know that managing risk is key to success and you are coaching your team on the same. The Portfolio Risk Management Plan is an important document that is referenced throughout the portfolio life cycle. Which of the following is correct regarding its purpose and focus?

As part of developing the Communication Management Plan, a portfolio manager executes the Communication Requirements Analysis, in addition to Stakeholders Analysis. Which of the following options in your opinion is a result of the Communication Requirements Analysis?

Assume you are new to your organization and you were hired specifically to help implement portfolio management in your new manufacturing company. Having worked in portfolio management for the past five years, you know it is a major culture change. It is definitely a challenge at your new company because:

While managing portfolio value, you met with stakeholders and discussed how to address the strengths and weaknesses in order to ensure benefits are comprehensively and holistically taken into consideration. Which of the following tools and techniques are you performing?

Your health insurance company has set up its portfolio into five different categories: research and development, IT, Medicare, government health insurance, and non-government health insurance. Funding is allocated yearly to each of these six categories. As the portfolio manager at the enterprise level, you:

Your organization conducted an OPM3 assessment focusing on its best practices in portfolio management and also on those that were needed. The OPM3 Certified Professional felt greater attention was needed managing strategic change. This means:

Assume you are the portfolio manager for your pork producing company, the market leader in your country. Over time, the industry has recovered from trichinosis as a risk. Your company has added new components to its portfolio, and many have been to demonstrate to the public that its products are safe. It implemented the Agriculture Department's and Food and Drug Administration's Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) regulations and is enhancing its image as 'the other white meat'. However, now the entire industry is faced with a new epidemic known as porcine epidemic virus, which is affecting pigs in 22 different states, and profits have decreased significantly. New components now must be added to the portfolio. This situation shows:

A portfolio manager needs to continuously balance the need and requirements with the available resources and needs to maintain a balanced portfolio and portfolio resources in order to optimize delivery. Capability and Capacity analysis is performed in 4 of the portfolio management processes and it serves a slightly different purpose in each and every one of them. You are currently using it in the development of your charter. What is its purpose in this case?

The audit department has found out that two of the departments have conflicting standards and have asked you to analyze and compare them in order to be able to take a decision which could impact the portfolio alignment. Which analysis will you use to compare conflicting standards in different departments

It is critical in portfolio management to focus on 'doing the right work'. This means stakeholder expectations and effective management of these expectations are essential. The primary conduit between the component managers and the other portfolio stakeholders is the:

When it comes to managing a portfolio, you have a variety of assets, plans and tools and techniques used. It requires a good experience to handle all of these artifacts. One of your portfolio team members came to you asking about the relation between the portfolio performance management plan, the portfolio management plan and portfolio strategic plan. What should your answer be?

It is rare for organizational leaders to have an in-depth knowledge of all the work under way in the portfolio, but it is needed for portfolio decision making. If you were asked to prepare such an inventory, it would:

Your company has a stated policy that all stakeholders are to be treated in an ethical manner. It is one of the largest project management training firms in the world and is a Registered Educational Provider with the Project Management Institute as well as with other associations. It is active in portfolio management to ensure it is offering the most beneficial products and services, both leading edge and traditional, to its customers. Its policy toward its stakeholders is:

While defining the portfolio, a portfolio manager does a preliminary comparison of all inventoried portfolio components against the portfolio component definition. For this, the descriptors of each portfolio component are used in order to compare it to other components. Which of the following is not a component key descriptors?

One of your components within the portfolio has been struggling and has undertaken a lot of issues. A recent measurement has shown that its CPI is 0.4 and SPI is 0.3. What is the best course of action you should take as a portfolio manager

Assume you are managing your city's portfolio, and its overall strategic goal is to promote economic development to attract more visitors to the city. It is a difficult challenge as the city is not a major metropolitan area and also is not a preferred winter or summer destination. Nonetheless, you are planning and allocating resources according to the city's strategy. Not to be overlooked as you do so is the need to:

In your web app company, the portfolio is constantly changing. It is not unusual for a new proposal to be submitted each day and for other components to be terminated as a competitor was first to market. The Portfolio Review Board usually meets daily in this fast-paced environment as it:

Portfolio managers tend to use the efficient frontier analysis as a modeling approach that gives decision makers the analytical tool to optimize portfolios given resource constraints such as risk. In which of the Portfolio management processes the efficient frontier is mostly used

As part of the strategic alignment, you Evaluate organizational strategic goals and objectives using document reviews, interviewing, and other information gathering techniques in order to

After the stakeholder analysis is complete, a best practice is to put stakeholders into a matrix to develop a communications management strategy. A simple but useful approach is to set it up to show:

As a portfolio manager you will use a variety of artifacts and documents that will help you better manage the portfolio and better communicate progress and status with stakeholders. The roadmap is considered the most used document in the portfolio and eases your work being able to present the status on a single graphical representation. Early on during the portfolio lifecycle, you prepare the roadmap. An output of this process is

You have scored the portfolio components and are analyzing the data in order to prioritize the components. Using the following scoring table, which of the options represents the correct Components Priority? Taking into consideration that the costs for each component is Component A: 10 K USD, Component B: 15 K USD, Component C: 16 K USD, Component D: 13 K USD and Component E: 11 K USD; The budget for this portfolio is a fixed one of 40 k USD

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You are managing a portfolio for your company and are trying to balance the tasks that will be done internally based on the availability and the ones that will be outsourced. Managing supply and demand is a recurring activity in the portfolio life cycle and results in changes in resource utilization and resource efficiency. Where is this type of results normally found?

You are managing a complex portfolio with high risk levels due to emerging technological breakthroughs and a short benefit window to market your product. You know that managing risk is key to success and you are coaching your team on the same. While planning for risk management, multiple investment choice tools are used as part of the quantitative and qualitative analyzes. Which of the following tools determine the effect of changing the portfolio?

Some of your Stakeholders reported to you that they are not receiving status reports and other regular information on the Portfolio progress. This has caused a big issue with the governance board and they requested an immediate resolution. You have already analyzed the stakeholders and prepared the communication matrix; what is your best course of action in this case?

Your company got recently acquired by another company and the strategic directions which your portfolio is based on have been changed. Which document do you, as a portfolio manager, change to reflect the portfolio new vision?

Following a major organizational restructuring, new portfolios are currently being initiated. You have been assigned the position of portfolio manager on one of the major portfolios and are currently in strategic management. You are currently meeting with stakeholders to document the internal and external financial dependencies and shared resources between different portfolio components. Which of the following techniques are you performing

Assume you are responsible for portfolio management in your organization. You are responsible for managing the value of the portfolio and for recommending changes to your Portfolio Review Board to enhance its value. To do so, you monitor benefits, interdependencies between components, changes, and responsibilities and accountabilities as stated in the:

You are the portfolio manager in a large organization including a diversity of stakeholders. From the start, you knew the importance of correctly managing the stakeholders requirements and concerns and you grouped them in order to

Calculate the composite index for the following portfolio having CPI weight = 80% and SPI weight = 20%

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While planning for risk management, multiple investment choice tools are used as part of the quantitative and qualitative analyzes; which of the following tools determines the effect of changing one or more factors?

One of your component managers came to you to tell you about a risk affecting his component that will badly impact the component and might affect the portfolio. After assessment, the risk turned out to be of low probability with high impact. What do you do as a portfolio manager?

Assume your pork producing company finds that there is an over-abundance of pork products and competitors in the marketplace even though it has had to implement Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) processes that are a regulatory requirement. Profits are lower than ever before in the history of the company. Management is changing the company's strategy to also focus on seafood products. You have been asked to complete a gap analysis to:

As a portfolio manager and in the aim of defining the preliminary list of components to be included in your portfolio, which will serve as a starting point for developing a portfolio. You start by identifying existing and potential portfolio components by reviewing documentation such as business plans/proposals in order to

Working previously in the financial industry and studying finance and risk in graduate school, you are familiar with Markowitz's Efficient Frontier theory. Now assume you are the portfolio manager for a state government agency. Your agency has a reputation of being risk adverse but given recent budget cuts, you have convinced your executive team it needs to pursue some new programs and projects to demonstrate its benefits to the state. You decided to apply the Efficient Frontier concepts to show them the current state of its components in terms of risk and associated costs. You explained the portfolio is efficient if it has:

A portfolio manager needs to continuously balance the need and requirements with the available resources to maintain a balanced portfolio and portfolio resources in order to optimize delivery. Capability and Capacity analysis is performed in 4 of the portfolio management processes and it serves a slightly different purpose in each and every one of them. When it relates to the organization level. This analysis comprises which of the following?

Following an organizational change and restructuring. One of the Portfolio Key Stakeholders got a promotion and became a director. She became less interested in your portfolio and you used to engage her very closely. What is your best course of action in this case?

Before any information in your web-based technology company is communicated externally, it must be submitted to the company's Public Relations Department to ensure sensitive information is not disclosed inadvertently to competitors. The Public Relations Director must sign off on all external information. You need to, as the portfolio manager:

Assume you are the portfolio manager for your HVAC (Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning) company, one of the largest in the world. Preparing for a meeting with the Portfolio Governance Committee, you have been reviewing the success of components that have been completed as well as the progress of current portfolio components. In many cases people who only purchased heating units in the northern part of the country, and people who purchased only air conditioners in the south, now are buying state-of the art products to easily switch as needed. You found the risks of climate change led to the need for these new energy efficient products and did so by:

In your diversified chicken products company, your portfolio of components in progress consists of approximately 175 programs, projects, and other work. Generally, at each Portfolio Review Board meeting, about 35 new proposals are reviewed to see if they should be part of the portfolio. As the portfolio manager, you have set up categories for these components. They are useful to facilitate portfolio optimization because:

Along the course of the portfolio, you will be monitoring and controlling the portfolio a.long with the related stakeholders and governance bodies. This is done as part of your role in portfolio oversight. As a portfolio manager, which of the following, in your opinion, is the objective/purpose of the Provide Portfolio Oversight Process?

Due to multiple occurrences of risk realization, the CEO has asked you to re-assess the portfolio risks once again. Up to what level in the organization do you go when you need to assess risks?

Your company, which has been in the blimp business for over 50 years, prides itself on its robust portfolio management process, which is especially useful now that the demand for blimps of various sizes is much greater than the capacity to produce them. One of the reasons the blimp company has been so successful over the years is it has central management of all of its resources. This approach is important:

You have been managing multiple portfolios in your company for the past two decades and all deliveries were successful. A new portfolio manager is struggling and came to you for advice on the portfolio process groups. He knows that portfolio process groups are the base of portfolio management. While you explain to him about them, you told him that portfolio process groups are independent of

You are the portfolio manager for a family business company who had an old CEO reluctant to change and to taking risks. The board has decided with the support of the president to change the CEO and assign a new one. The executive directors along with the president have as well advised the new CEO to be more aggressive. Which of the following documents need to be updated in this case?