Title: Project Management — LearnCoachAssist

Q: What is project management?
A: Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements. It involves planning, organizing, and controlling resources to achieve specific goals within constraints like scope, time, and cost.

Q: What is the difference between a project and operations?
A: A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result, with a defined beginning and end. Operations are ongoing, repetitive activities that sustain the business, unlike projects which are unique and finite.

Q: What are the triple constraints in project management?
A: The triple constraints, also known as the iron triangle, are scope, time, and cost. Changes to one constraint affect the others, and quality is often considered a fourth constraint.

Q: Who is a project manager?
A: A project manager is the person responsible for planning, executing, and closing a project, ensuring it meets objectives within constraints. They lead the team, manage stakeholders, and handle risks and changes.

Q: What is PMBOK?
A: PMBOK stands for Project Management Body of Knowledge, a guide published by the Project Management Institute (PMI) outlining standards, best practices, and guidelines for project management. The latest edition structures content around 10 knowledge areas and 5 process groups.

Q: What are the five process groups in PMBOK?
A: The five process groups are Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring and Controlling, and Closing. They represent the phases through which a project progresses iteratively.

Q: What happens in the Initiating process group?
A: In the Initiating process group, the project is authorized, and the project charter is created. High-level risks, milestones, and stakeholders are identified.

Q: What is the primary output of the Planning process group?
A: The primary outputs include the project management plan, which encompasses subsidiary plans for scope, schedule, cost, quality, resources, communications, risk, procurement, and stakeholders.

Q: Describe the Executing process group.
A: The Executing process group involves directing and managing project work, acquiring and developing the team, managing communications, stakeholder engagement, and procuring resources to deliver project outputs.

Q: What is the purpose of the Monitoring and Controlling process group?
A: It involves tracking, reviewing, and regulating project progress and performance to meet objectives, including controlling changes, scope, schedule, cost, quality, and risks.

Q: What occurs in the Closing process group?
A: The Closing process group finalizes all activities, obtains stakeholder acceptance, releases resources, archives documents, and documents lessons learned to formally close the project.

Q: What is the Scope Management knowledge area?
A: Scope Management involves planning, controlling what is and is not included in the project to prevent scope creep. Key processes include collecting requirements, defining scope, creating WBS, validating, and controlling scope.

Q: Explain Time Management in projects.
A: Time Management, or Schedule Management, includes planning the schedule, defining activities, sequencing them, estimating durations, developing the schedule, and controlling it. Tools like CPM and Gantt charts are used.

Q: What is Cost Management?
A: Cost Management plans, estimates, budgets, and controls costs to ensure the project is completed within the approved budget. It includes earned value management for performance measurement.

Q: Describe Quality Management.
A: Quality Management plans, manages, and controls quality to ensure project deliverables meet stakeholder requirements. It involves quality planning, assurance, and control using tools like Pareto charts and cause-and-effect diagrams.

Q: What is Resource Management?
A: Resource Management identifies, acquires, develops, and manages project team and physical resources. It covers planning resource management, estimating resources, acquiring, developing, managing the team, and controlling resources.

Q: Explain Communications Management.
A: Communications Management ensures timely and appropriate generation, collection, distribution, storage, retrieval, and disposition of project information. It plans communications, manages them, and monitors effectiveness.

Q: What does Risk Management entail?
A: Risk Management plans risk responses, identifies, analyzes, prioritizes risks, implements responses, and monitors them. Risks are uncertain events that could impact objectives positively or negatively.

Q: Describe Procurement Management.
A: Procurement Management plans, conducts, controls, and closes procurements of products, services, or results from outside the organization. It involves make-or-buy decisions and contract management.

Q: What is Stakeholder Management?
A: Stakeholder Management identifies, analyzes, plans engagements, and manages stakeholders' needs, expectations, and influences. A stakeholder register and engagement assessment matrix are key tools.

Q: What is Integration Management?
A: Integration Management coordinates all project elements, including developing the project charter, management plan, directing work, managing knowledge, monitoring performance, and closing the project.

Q: What is a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)?
A: A WBS is a hierarchical decomposition of the total scope of work into manageable sections called work packages. It serves as a basis for scheduling, costing, and risk analysis.

Q: What is a Gantt chart?
A: A Gantt chart is a bar chart that illustrates the project schedule, showing start and finish dates of tasks, dependencies, and milestones in a timeline format.

Q: Explain the Critical Path Method (CPM).
A: CPM identifies the longest sequence of dependent tasks (critical path) that determines the minimum project duration. Tasks on the critical path have zero float and must be completed on time.

Q: What is slack or float in scheduling?
A: Slack, or float, is the amount of time a task can be delayed without delaying the project finish date. Total float is for the project end; free float is before affecting successors.

Q: What is a RACI matrix?
A: RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed; it's a responsibility assignment matrix clarifying roles and responsibilities for project tasks to avoid confusion.

Q: What is the Waterfall methodology?
A: Waterfall is a linear, sequential approach where phases like requirements, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance are completed one after another. It's suitable for projects with fixed requirements.

Q: What is Agile project management?
A: Agile is an iterative, flexible approach emphasizing collaboration, customer feedback, and delivering working software in short cycles called sprints. It values individuals, working software, and responding to change.

Q: What are the four core values of the Agile Manifesto?
A: They are: individuals and interactions over processes and tools; working software over comprehensive documentation; customer collaboration over contract negotiation; responding to change over following a plan.

Q: What is Scrum?
A: Scrum is an Agile framework with roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Development Team), events (Sprint, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Retrospective), and artifacts (Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, Increment). Sprints are typically 2-4 weeks.

Q: Who is the Product Owner in Scrum?
A: The Product Owner manages the Product Backlog, prioritizes features based on value, accepts work, and represents stakeholders and customers.

Q: What is the role of the Scrum Master?
A: The Scrum Master facilitates Scrum processes, removes impediments, coaches the team on Agile practices, and ensures adherence to Scrum rules without being a traditional manager.

Q: What is a Sprint in Scrum?
A: A Sprint is a time-boxed iteration (usually 2-4 weeks) where the team delivers a potentially shippable product increment. It includes planning, daily scrums, review, and retrospective.

Q: What is Kanban?
A: Kanban is a visual workflow management method using a board with columns (e.g., To Do, In Progress, Done) to limit work-in-progress, improve flow, and enable continuous delivery.

Q: What is Lean project management?
A: Lean focuses on maximizing value by eliminating waste (e.g., overproduction, waiting, defects) through principles like value stream mapping, just-in-time delivery, and continuous improvement (Kaizen).

Q: What is a project charter?
A: A project charter formally authorizes the project, names the project manager, defines high-level objectives, scope, stakeholders, and authority levels. It's issued by the sponsor.

Q: What is scope creep?
A: Scope creep is the uncontrolled expansion of project scope without adjustments to time, cost, and resources. It is managed through change control processes.

Q: Explain change control.
A: Change control is a formal process to review, evaluate, approve, or reject proposed changes to baselines like scope, schedule, or cost. It uses a Change Control Board (CCB).

Q: What is a baseline in project management?
A: A baseline is the approved version of a plan (scope, schedule, cost) used as a reference to measure performance. It can only be changed through formal control processes.

Q: What is Earned Value Management (EVM)?
A: EVM is a technique integrating scope, schedule, and cost to measure project performance. Key metrics include PV (planned value), EV (earned value), AC (actual cost), SPI (schedule performance index), and CPI (cost performance index).

Q: Define Schedule Performance Index (SPI).
A: SPI = EV / PV; it measures schedule efficiency. SPI > 1 means ahead of schedule; SPI < 1 means behind.

Q: Define Cost Performance Index (CPI).
A: CPI = EV / AC; it measures cost efficiency. CPI > 1 means under budget; CPI < 1 means over budget.

Q: What is the critical chain method?
A: Critical Chain Method focuses on resource constraints, using buffers (project, feeding, resource) to manage uncertainties and protect the critical chain.

Q: What is PERT?
A: PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) uses three time estimates (optimistic, most likely, pessimistic) for probabilistic scheduling, calculating expected duration as (O + 4M + P)/6.

Q: What is a Monte Carlo simulation in risk management?
A: Monte Carlo simulation runs thousands of scenarios using probability distributions for durations, costs, etc., to predict project outcomes like completion probability and risk exposure.

Q: What are story points in Agile?
A: Story points estimate relative effort for user stories using Fibonacci-like scales (1,2,3,5,8...), considering complexity, risk, and effort, not hours.

Q: What is Velocity in Scrum?
A: Velocity is the sum of story points completed per sprint, used to forecast future sprints and release planning. It helps teams improve predictability.

Q: What is PRINCE2?
A: PRINCE2 (Projects IN Controlled Environments) is a process-based methodology with seven principles, themes, and processes, emphasizing defined roles, stages, and business justification.

Q: What are contract types in procurement?
A: Common types include Fixed-Price (FP), Time and Materials (T&M), and Cost-Reimbursable (CR). FP suits well-defined scopes; CR for uncertain scopes.

Q: What is a risk register?
A: A risk register documents identified risks, their probability, impact, owners, responses (avoid, mitigate, transfer, accept), and status for ongoing tracking.

Q: Explain stakeholder analysis.
A: Stakeholder analysis identifies stakeholders, assesses their power/interest/influence, and develops engagement strategies. Tools include power/interest grid and salience model.

Q: What are lessons learned?
A: Lessons learned are documented experiences, knowledge gained during the project (positive/negative), captured throughout and formally during closure to improve future projects.

Q: Differentiate project, program, and portfolio management.
A: A project delivers a unique outcome; a program coordinates related projects for benefits; a portfolio is a collection of projects/programs aligned to strategic objectives.