PfMP Portfolio Management Professional (PfMP) Questions and Answers

Multiple changes have been recommended and approved in your portfolio and the need for continuous optimization seems to never end. This is normal in a portfolio and optimizing the components mix and the use of resources is key to success. As a portfolio manager you will be re-visiting the Optimize Portfolio process countless times. Which of the following are considered outputs to this process?

You are in the toughest phase of the portfolio life cycle due to the governmental issues in your country. Yesterday night, one of the key team members quit and left the country. You have included this in the portfolio risk register while planning the portfolio because you knew that this could happen and that this key resource has family in Canada and can leave if the situation gets bad. Following this, you activated the response plan, which is to initiate a new component that will cater for reaching the deliverable in another way. However, an immediate approval is needed for initiation of this component or the end-of-month major deliverable will be delayed. To whom you should present the proposal for urgent approval?

Companies adopt project, program and portfolio management practices to enable the realization of business value and the achievement of strategies and objectives. In order to advance the organizational capability and facilitate the alignment of these practices, the company should (choose the best answer)

Managing risk is key to the success of any initiative. Risk is considered to be inherent in any activity we do in project management and at any level. You are currently assessing risk against multiple criteria and classifying them as part of developing the risk management plan. Which of the below reflects what you are doing?

Communication requirements are analyzed and documented in the portfolio communication management plan to be used by other processes as needed. Which of the processes use this information in order to provide accurate information in a timely manner?

One of your team members came to you asking about the risk "Watch List"; he heard this term in a meeting on risk analysis and did not know what it meant. What will your advice to your team member be?

By setting up portfolio categories and using a pair-wise comparison approach to rank components, as the portfolio manager, you feel that you are finally setting up and getting people to follow standard portfolio practices. Since portfolio management still is relatively new, progress is under way. As some components are added, and others are not continued, you are making sure if a component is terminated that it does not have dependencies with others in the portfolio. You need to then:

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 techniques uses historical data to determine if resource requirements have been consistently underestimated?

Strategies are changing, the portfolio mix is changing, the portfolio is progressing and you are doing a great job optimizing the mix of components. What tools and techniques are you using in the case?

Stakeholders are an integral part of the portfolio. The portfolio manager will work with the stakeholders to plan, execute and eventually deliver and close the portfolio. While developing the performance management plan, the portfolio manager plans a series of sessions with key stakeholders to define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). What are these sessions collectively referred to in a portfolio?

Embracing a management-by-projects culture means there tends to be far more projects to pursue than available resources. An approach then is required to guide decisions as to components in the portfolio. A best practice to follow is to:

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. When it relates to managing the supply and demand , what is the purpose of using this analysis?

Assume you are creating a roadmap for your portfolio and will present it to key stakeholders and then to the Portfolio Review Board. You realize you will be adding additional detail to it, but you also believe its graphical format will be useful. In developing it, you decide to reference prioritization, dependencies, and organizational areas so you should consult the:

The company's management is not happy with the bared risk for the expected Portfolio value return and has reached a subject matter expert to try to re-align the risk level with the management expectations. The expert stated that it is preferable to diversify the portfolio components in order to get more results. In that case, you

starting with the business unit you lead, which is responsible for new products, and then will set the stage to implement it throughout the bank, including at the enterprise level. You have executive support and commitment to implement it in your business unit. A key first step is to:

Assume you are working to prepare the low-level schedule and timelines for portfolio components. You want to make sure, as the portfolio manager, for your country's initiatives to promote an awareness of the importance of climate change, that each component then can be monitored and tracked to assess performance. To do so, you should:

You have been assigned as the manager for a major transformation portfolio in your company. You are acquiring the position due to the failure of the previous manager and the strategic importance of the portfolio. You start by consulting the portfolio strategic plan. What do you expect finding in that plan?

Chartering a portfolio is a major step in getting the needed authorizations to execute the portfolio. Your are currently developing the charter and considering the following inputs

Due to market technological changes, your company got impacted and was urged to revise its portfolios. You are currently revising your portfolio to determine the required changes in the component mix. Which of the following options is the means to the "to-be" vision?

While managing a program for the banking sector spanning multiple transformational areas. A new portfolio manager comes to you seeking advice on the usefulness of ROI. You tell her that ROI is the best method to measure returns of

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 Stakeholders Analysis?

As you grow older, you gain more experience and things that once seemed hard to assimilate, can become very easy. One junior member of your portfolio management team is confused on the relationship between the Optimize, Authorize and Provide Oversight processes. What could your advice to him be?

Portfolios have a lot of components in them and are executed along an extended lifecycle. For this, as a portfolio manager, you continuously monitor and control the progress and status. What input can you use to help you with this?

One of the stakeholders of one of your components came to you complaining that his manager is not receiving specific information on multiple components progress. What is your best course of action?

The portfolio manager defines the portfolio based on a listing of already existing work in the organization and selects the right components in order to be able to prioritize them. What do you use for defining the portfolio based on the listing of work?

Assume you are the corporate portfolio manager for your global organization. There is one portfolio at the corporate level, but other portfolios supporting business units and core areas of the company. One of these portfolios involves manufacturing, and its number one program in terms of priorities is to implement an enterprise resource planning system. Since it is the number one ranked program in this portfolio, it is of interest at the corporate level, and you and your team provide reports on its progress monthly. You can see that:

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

As the portfolio manager in the third largest automotive manufacturer in your country, you have a large number of components especially new vehicles each year but also support for dealers, advertising, maintaining the brand image, increasing market share plus continuous improvement initiatives. You have contingency reserve to use to prepare to handle any risks that may occur, which is based on:

Your portfolio management team is a bit confused about the order of steps to follow when defining a portfolio. They have been having debates and they came to you asking for the correct order of steps

You are managing a large portfolio and are approaching to a major checkpoint. As a portfolio manager, you are now collecting information and reports from various components for aggregation and presentation. What method/tool can you use to support you in this process?

Many people in your country are no longer eating food from cans because of the risk of botulism and eColi O1H747. Your low acid canned foods company is seeing its revenues decrease as a result, and it is updating its overall strategy for the company to diversify into other markets as well as to add an aggressive marketing campaign to ensure the public that its low acid canned foods are generally recognized as safe by the Food and Drug Administration. This means in terms of portfolio management:

You are managing a complex portfolio with high risk levels due to emerging technological breakthroughs and a short benefit window to market your product. The Portfolio Process Assets are important and referenced throughout the portfolio life cycle. Which of the following is correct regarding the Portfolio Process Assets purpose and focus?

While the Governance Board has a variety of significant roles in portfolio management, especially in terms of the recommendations it makes, c they involve:

Assume your airline just merged with a competitor, making it the largest in the country. Your company has a defined portfolio management process in place, which is considered effective by your executives. The other airline uses a more informal approach. Executives from both airlines now have different philosophies concerning new work to be pursued to be the leading airline in the country. In terms of the Authorize Portfolio process, this means:

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, in addition to managing communication, risk, etc. For this you develop a robust Portfolio Management Plan. Which of the below is not a part of this plan?

Each portfolio risk should have a designated person as its owner. As the portfolio manager assigns the owner, the main responsibility is to:

The portfolio strategic plan should contain a prioritization model or approach that guides the ongoing decisions as to which portfolio components should be added, terminated, or changed, as well as prioritizes and balances the component mix over time. A simple prioritization model may be provided which contains

When we talk about portfolios, programs and projects, it is inevitable to mention the business value which is the sum of tangible and intangible assets of an organization, also known as the net quantifiable benefit. When it comes to business value, at which level of the organization is the delivery of Business Value optimized?

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?

Assume you are the portfolio manager for a company that specializes in software, including portfolio management software. It has many components under way to enhance the existing product line but also to move the company into Cloud computing. You regularly prepare reports on the portfolio status but lately have had a large number of stakeholders request ad hoc reports. You decided to survey your stakeholders to learn about their information needs. You next decided to hold some one-on-one interviews with several interested and influential stakeholders in terms of communications requirements. From these interviews you are concerned that some stakeholder groups may be missing so you decided to:

One of the major resources on your portfolio is needed by two of the components at the same time. This resource has high technical knowledge and is aware of all the business needs. Which of the following tools and techniques can you use in order to solve this issue?

In your portfolio some of the programs and projects that are being pursued will realize benefits throughout the program and project's life cycle, while others will not realize the benefits until the program or project is closed or years later. This means as the portfolio manager, you should:

A portfolio manager on one of the major sub-portfolios in your portfolio has tendered his resignation and gave you a 2 months notice. This unexpected change will require you to take immediate action with the governance board. Which of the following processes will be handling this situation?

Your company has multiple portfolios on the way and a variety of different clients and industries. Risk levels are high due to recent governmental regulations and the company has recently been penalized due to a non-compliance to one of the standards. You know that you need to closely managing this. As a result, you will be come out with

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. A major risk has recently occurred and the risk owner came to you asking advise on how to report it. what would you advise her?

Your Portfolio Review Board is scheduled to meet in a week. Resources only are available to support one project, and detailed business cases have been prepared for two of them. Your company has a policy of being risk adverse. Based on the following table, which project would you recommend to the Board, and what else would you mention to them?

You are managing a large portfolio and know that you will need to constantly show the progress and status of the portfolio in meeting. For this you have developed a robust roadmap using BI tools. The portfolio roadmap is used abundantly as an input to 7 processes. When it comes to managing portfolio value, how is the portfolio roadmap used?

You have been a successful program manager for many years in your State Department of Agriculture. During this time, you managed large programs, and some had major risks to mitigate especially in the information systems area as new software would be released that was commercially available, and you knew it would then enhance the benefits to your customers if you acquired it. You were the first in the Department to get your PfMP, and it led to a promotion to become the first portfolio manager. After a year in this position, you find managing risks and issues to be totally different because:

Manage supply and demand comes down to balancing the requirements with what is available. Resource requirements are a major input to the manage supply and demand process. Which of the following inputs to this process contains resource requirements?

Programs and projects in your company, one of the largest banks in the world, are required to submit metrics as to their individual progress each month. To simplify the collection and reporting process, you held interviews with members of the Portfolio Review Board to see their areas of greatest interest and also with program and project managers to determine how difficult it would be to collect the data. You then selected 10 possible metrics to the Board, with a goal that five would be regularly reported. It is important to note that:

The portfolio is undergoing and your are now in the monitoring and controlling phase. Two of your team members are arguing about what to use in order to determine decisions to be made with regards to the portfolio and its components. What should be your advice to them?

Each year, you update the portfolio roadmap so people within the organization can see component status, interdependencies, constraints, and business value, among other things. This year, however, two major programs in the portfolio were cancelled as they were government contracts, and the government lacked funds to complete them. Your management then had to reduce staffing. These two programs had dependencies with other components in the portfolio. This means that:

In a portfolio, data is an abundant asset, and managing the information aiming for a a better decision making is critical. For this you use a variety of Quantitative and Qualitative analysis methods. These methods are performed in 4 of the portfolio management processes and serve a slightly different purpose in each and every one of them. Considering that you are currently working to ensure resource capacity is optimally allocated against resource requirements or demand based on known organizational priorities and potential value, how can you make use of the quantitative and qualitative analysis?

Your company changed its executives due to the lack of benefits realization and previous corruption issues. The new management has informed you that as of now, this will not change any process in the portfolio and everything will remain the same. However, only the risk tolerance for the organization will be impacted, what will you do as a portfolio manager?

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

As you focus on managing the value pf the portfolio, you find that portfolio variance/alert reports are helpful. Assume you have been using a 'traffic light' format as it is easy to prepare, but an objective is to:

Updates to schedules i.e. resource, funding, benefits, are results of Developing the Portfolio Performance Management Plan process. Where should these updates be recorded?

You are managing a portfolio in a functional organization and resources are shared between operations and projects. You are continuously performing capability and capacity analysis in order to optimize the portfolio. Which of the following capability and capacity analysis is used to limit the number OR size of components the organization can execute?

Portfolios include a lot of work and as a portfolio manager you need to keep an eye on the value realization while maintaining the strategic alignment. You are currently aggregating value delivered by the portfolio components. What outputs do you expect to get out of this?

Your organization tried implementing portfolio management in the past, but even though it purchased a sophisticated automated software system for scoring and prioritization, it was not successful. After a year of complaints about the system, the executive team disbanded it. Now, resources are scarce, and some executives who were involved in the earlier attempt have left the company. The new CEO asked for a list of ongoing programs, projects, and operational work, and you could not provide one even though you direct the Project Management Office. He wants this inventory so it then can be used as the starting point to implement portfolio management. You and several others stated it did not work previously and do not believe it will work in the company. The CEO then hired a person to be the portfolio manager from outside who reports directly to him. The portfolio manager is emphasizing the importance of resources working on initiatives aligned with organizational strategy as part of the:

One of the key stakeholders came to you asking you to add more metrics because she thinks that it would give the portfolio management a better view of the actual progress. For her the more metrics you have the better. What should your opinion be regarding this?

You are approaching a major checkpoint and right before the review meeting, one of the key stakeholders asked you to add a small component which is of high interest to her and requires minimal effort and spans a short duration. What should you, as a portfolio manager do?

As part of the portfolio communication management, multiple documents are prepared in order to effectively manage communications. The Communication Calendar is one of the prepared documents, what does it include?

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:

You have just recommended the Portfolio Strategic Plan and Portfolio to the governance board for approval. The portfolio board members informed you that they did not find what they were looking for in the strategic plan and that it needs to be reworked. What should have been part of your Strategic Plan?

During one of the review meetings, the governance board asked to know the progress with relation to benefits of one of the major programs in your portfolio; in this case you will advise the program manager to present

You are the manager for a governmental portfolio aiming to restructure the roads in your country. Having a tight schedule, a large number of stakeholders including the public, in addition to a strict budgeting framework, you know that you will be managing the portfolio closely and that the governance board and the stakeholders would want to check on the progress and status frequently. For this you have developed a robust Portfolio management plan. What do you expect as output of this development?

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

While Optimizing your portfolio, you need to present to the governance board how your components will be ranked and balanced in a quantifiable way. How will you do this?

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:

As a portfolio manager and as part of your governance role, you use multiple tools and techniques to monitor and control the portfolio and maintain oversight. Which of the following can be used as tools and techniques in your role in oversight?