PMP 2026 Practice Questions, Set 2 (Free)

Try these free questions

1. An insurer is being restructured, and the legal review function has been folded into a new risk and compliance group. Halfway through a two week iteration, the reviewer who normally signs off customer wording is no longer in post and nobody has been named in her place. Three of the eight stories the team committed to need that sign off before they can be called done. Five stories carry no legal dependency, and the refined backlog holds several ready items of similar size. The transition lead for the restructuring has a published mailbox and a stated two day response target. The team's morale has held up well and the sponsor is on leave for a week. What should the project manager do next?

   1. Keep the three stories open and have the whole team assist the five remaining stories through to completion, accepting that the iteration goal will be only partly met.
   2. Split the three stories so that the parts needing no legal sign off can be marked complete inside this iteration.
   3. Contact the sponsor on leave and ask for the previous reviewer to be temporarily reinstated until the new compliance group is staffed.
   4. Pull ready items with no legal dependency into the iteration to protect the goal, and put the unnamed reviewer to the transition lead with a resolution date.
   Show the answer and explanation

   Answer: D. Two facts have to be held together: the blocking condition sits outside the team and will not clear on the team's timescale, and there is ready work that does not touch it. That combination makes reprioritising the right move rather than an evasion. Pulling in ready items with no legal dependency keeps the iteration producing value while the three stories wait, and naming the missing reviewer to the transition lead, with a date attached, puts the impediment in front of the only person who can resolve it during a restructuring. The date matters, because an impediment raised without one drifts. Keeping the three stories open and piling the team onto the remaining five sounds like focus, but five stories will not absorb eight people, and the iteration ends with idle time and a missed goal for no gain. Splitting the stories so the unreviewed parts can be called complete is the most dangerous option because it looks agile: it breaches the definition of done, and customer wording that has not been reviewed sitting in a done column is how unreviewed wording reaches customers. Reaching the sponsor on leave to reinstate the old reviewer skips the person accountable for the transition and asks for a decision the restructuring has already taken. Escalation would be right if the transition lead missed the stated date. ECO Domain III, Business Environment, task 'Remove impediments and manage issues'; PMBOK Guide Eighth Edition, Resources Performance Domain.

2. Penrith Diagnostics shipped a firmware release that mis-reported one analyser reading, and the escape was caught by a hospital customer rather than by the project team. During the recovery review the team lead recalls that six weeks before release the test environment lost its link to the regulated reference data set, so the full verification suite could not be run. The team raised this in three consecutive standups, logged it, and worked around it by testing against a sampled copy. The environment is owned by a separate infrastructure function reporting to a different director, and nobody on the project could compel a fix. The project manager tracked the item as a team impediment for the whole six weeks and kept the workaround in place. The delivery date, fixed by a regulatory submission window, never moved. What did the project manager most likely fail to do?

   1. Rescored the release risk at each sprint boundary and raised its probability rating in the register as the workaround persisted
   2. Asked the infrastructure engineers to slot the environment rebuild into their own backlog refinement
   3. Added a compensating step so that results from the sampled data were independently reviewed before release sign-off
   4. Handed the blocked environment to the body with authority over both functions once the team's own attempts had failed
   Show the answer and explanation

   Answer: D. This item turns on the boundary of the project manager's authority, and the settling detail is that the blocked environment belonged to a function outside the project reporting to a different director. An impediment the team cannot clear by its own effort has stopped being a team impediment, whatever the standup notes call it. The keyed answer is that the blockage needed to go to a body with authority over both areas as soon as the team's own approaches had failed, and it needed to go there in week one rather than week six. Escalation here is not passing the problem along; it is the only route to a decision the project manager was never able to make. Rescoring the risk each sprint is tidy record keeping that changes nothing, because a rising score with no owner able to act is simply a documented failure in progress. Asking the infrastructure engineers to squeeze the rebuild into their own refinement is the collaborative move candidates are trained to prefer, and it is roughly what the team spent six weeks doing; it fails because the priority call belonged to their director, not to them. Independent review of sampled results is the most seductive option because it is technically sensible, and it would be a reasonable holding measure for a week or two while an escalation ran. Used instead of escalation on a regulated device, it accepts a verification gap rather than removing it, which is how the escape reached a patient. ECO Domain III, Business Environment, task 'Remove impediments and manage issues'; PMBOK Guide Eighth Edition, Governance Performance Domain and the Be an Accountable Leader principle.

3. Ardent Bank is building an AI assistant that suggests next actions to branch staff during customer conversations. The head of retail operations wants a single recommended action displayed, arguing that staff freeze when given choices and that handling time will suffer. The head of compliance insists every suggestion show the evidence behind it and an explicit option to decline, which the model team says will roughly double response time but is technically straightforward. The bank operates a model risk governance committee, chaired by the chief risk officer, whose remit covers the behaviour of any model influencing customer outcomes. The requirements baseline is due in two weeks, the pilot branches are already selected, and the sponsor, the retail director, has told you to settle the argument quickly. What should the project manager do?

   1. Facilitate a workshop between the two heads, help them reach a position both can support, and baseline whichever requirement emerges from that discussion.
   2. Take the conflict to the model risk governance committee, since the transparency requirement sits inside its remit, and baseline what it confirms.
   3. Baseline the compliance requirement, on the basis that a regulatory requirement will always outrank an operational preference about staff handling time in a bank.
   4. Ask the sponsor to choose between the two positions, since the retail director funds the project and is entitled to set its priorities before the baseline is fixed.
   Show the answer and explanation

   Answer: B. Both heads are senior and both arguments are reasonable, which is exactly why the answer is not about who is more persuasive. The stem names a model risk governance committee chaired by the chief risk officer whose remit covers the behaviour of any model influencing customer outcomes, and whether an AI assistant shows its evidence and allows a decline is model behaviour affecting customers. That places the decision outside both business heads and outside the sponsor. Option 2 takes it where it belongs and then baselines the confirmed requirement, which also gives the project a defensible record when the assistant is later reviewed. Option 1 is the collaborative answer and it is the trap. Two executives agreeing between themselves cannot waive a requirement that a governance body owns, and a negotiated compromise on transparency would have to be unpicked later, after the baseline, at far greater cost. Option 3 reaches the outcome the committee may well confirm, but it gets there by applying a slogan instead of establishing authority, and it prejudges a body that might permit a single recommendation with evidence available on request. A correct answer by accident is still a governance failure. Option 4 is the escalation reflex pointed at the wrong person; the sponsor funds the work and can set priorities within his authority, and model risk is not within it. ECO Domain I, People, tasks 'Align stakeholder expectations' and 'Manage conflicts'; PMBOK Guide Eighth Edition, Governance and Stakeholders Performance Domains.

Take the full free 10-question sample with scoring →