PMI-SP Risk Analysis & Contingency Planning 5 ā Questions and Answers
Question 1: A project team identifies a risk that has a high probability of occurring but decides to accept it because the cost of mitigation exceeds the cost of the delay. This is an example of:
- Risk avoidance
- Active risk acceptance with a contingency plan
- Passive risk acceptance (Correct answer)
- Risk escalation to the program manager
Correct answer: Passive risk acceptance
Passive acceptance means no proactive response is plannedāthe team simply acknowledges the risk and deals with consequences if it occurs, often appropriate when mitigation costs exceed impact costs.
Question 2: When integrating schedule risk analysis with cost risk analysis, which metric BEST represents the combined impact on project value?
- Total float across all network paths
- Joint cost-schedule probability distributions from integrated simulation (Correct answer)
- The sum of individual EMVs for cost and schedule risks
- The critical path length compared to the project budget
Correct answer: Joint cost-schedule probability distributions from integrated simulation
Integrated cost-schedule risk simulation produces joint probability distributions that reflect realistic dependencies between schedule delays and cost overruns.
Question 3: A risk owner is assigned to a specific schedule risk. What is the PRIMARY responsibility of the risk owner?
- Funding all cost impacts associated with the risk
- Implementing and monitoring the agreed risk response strategy (Correct answer)
- Escalating every risk to the project sponsor weekly
- Removing the risk from the register once assigned
Correct answer: Implementing and monitoring the agreed risk response strategy
The risk owner is accountable for executing the planned risk response and monitoring the risk for changes in status or effectiveness of the response.
Question 4: A scheduler reviewing the project risk register notices that several risk responses have been implemented, but the risks have not been reassessed. What is the MOST significant problem with this situation?
- The risk register will have too many entries for stakeholders to review
- Residual risks after response implementation may remain unidentified and unplanned (Correct answer)
- Risk owners will lose accountability for their assigned risks
- The project baseline will need to be formally rebaselined
Correct answer: Residual risks after response implementation may remain unidentified and unplanned
Without reassessing risks after response implementation, residual risksāthose remaining after the responseāmay go unidentified, leaving the schedule exposed.
Question 5: Which technique involves adding buffer time at the end of a project or phase to protect the overall project delivery date from the accumulation of individual activity uncertainties?
- Activity float
- Project buffer in Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) (Correct answer)
- Lag time between activities
- Total slack management
Correct answer: Project buffer in Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM)
In CCPM, a project buffer is placed at the end of the critical chain to absorb variability that propagates through the schedule, protecting the final delivery date.
Question 6: A project team is conducting a risk workshop. The facilitator uses an anonymous voting technique to prevent dominant personalities from skewing the group's risk probability assessments. This technique is called:
- Brainstorming
- Delphi technique (Correct answer)
- Nominal group technique
- Affinity diagramming
Correct answer: Delphi technique
The Delphi technique uses anonymous, iterative rounds of expert input to build consensus on risk probability and impact estimates without groupthink bias.
Question 7: A PMI-SP practitioner is presenting schedule risk analysis results to a steering committee. The committee asks what the 'confidence level' of the schedule means. The BEST explanation is:
- The number of risks identified on the project
- The probability that the project will be completed by a specified date (Correct answer)
- The percentage of activities that are on the critical path
- The ratio of contingency reserve to total project budget
Correct answer: The probability that the project will be completed by a specified date
Confidence level in schedule risk analysis represents the statistical probabilityāderived from simulationāthat the project will complete on or before a specified target date.
PMI-SP Risk Analysis & Contingency Planning 5
A project team identifies a risk that has a high probability of occurring but decides to accept it because the cost of mitigation exceeds the cost of the delay.
This is an example of: