Unit 5: Resource Allocation, Monitoring and Control - Practice Quiz

1 What is the main purpose of resource allocation in a software project?

2 Which activity is part of identifying resource requirements?

3 What should a project manager check before scheduling a team member for a task?

4 What is resource over-allocation?

5 Why is the resource and cost schedule published?

6 What usually determines the sequence of project activities?

7 What does a monitoring framework mainly define?

8 Which item is useful for collecting project progress data?

9 Which chart commonly shows project tasks against time?

10 What is the primary purpose of a project status report?

11 What is a milestone in a project schedule?

12 What does cost monitoring compare most directly?

13 What is the first appropriate action when a project change is requested?

14 Which of the following is usually a direct project cost?

15 Which of the following is usually an indirect project cost?

16 In earned value analysis, what does Earned Value (EV) represent?

17 Which formula gives the Cost Performance Index (CPI)?

18 What is a key benefit of using AI in a real-time project status dashboard?

19 What is the purpose of an intelligent project notification?

20 Which visual element is suitable for showing the percentage of a task completed?

21 A project manager assigns the same database specialist to two critical tasks scheduled for the same week. The specialist can work only 40 hours, but the tasks require a total of 64 hours. What should the project manager do first?

22 A testing activity requires 240 person-hours and must be completed in 10 working days. If each tester can contribute 6 productive hours per day, what is the minimum number of testers required?

23 A developer is available only from Monday to Wednesday. A 24-hour task is initially scheduled from Tuesday to Thursday, with 8 hours of work per day. Which scheduling adjustment best respects the resource calendar without changing the effort?

24 Two activities need the same analyst. Activity X is on the critical path, while Activity Y has five days of total float. If both are scheduled simultaneously, what is the most appropriate allocation decision?

25 Before publishing a resource and cost schedule as the project baseline, which review is most important?

26 Task B can begin only after Task A is completed, while Task C may start when Task A starts. Which dependency combination represents this scheduling sequence?

27 A project manager is creating a monitoring framework for a six-month software project. Which design provides the clearest basis for control?

28 A manager needs reliable weekly data for comparing actual effort with planned effort. Which collection method is most appropriate?

29 A team wants to show how much work remains in a sprint each day and whether completion is trending toward the sprint deadline. Which visualization is most suitable?

30 A project is two weeks behind schedule because an external interface was delivered late. Which status report entry is most useful to decision-makers?

31 At the current status date, a design-approval milestone was planned for day 30 but is now forecast for day 36. The milestone was forecast for day 34 in the previous report. What does the latest analysis indicate?

32 A work package has a planned cost of $50,000 for the work scheduled to date, but actual spending is $58,000. Before judging cost performance, what additional information is most important?

33 A customer requests an additional reporting feature after the project scope baseline has been approved. What should the project manager do next?

34 A project incurs $80,000 in developer wages, $12,000 in project-specific cloud charges, and $8,000 as its allocated share of corporate office rent. What are the direct and indirect costs?

35 At the end of a month, a project has planned value , earned value , and actual cost . What are the schedule variance and cost variance?

36 A project has earned value , actual cost , and planned value . Which interpretation is correct?

37 A project has a budget at completion of and a current cost performance index of . If the same cost efficiency is expected to continue, what is the estimate at completion?

38 An AI dashboard shows a sudden 25% drop in project completion after data is synchronized from several tools. What should the project manager do before initiating corrective action?

39 A project team receives hundreds of automated alerts each day and begins ignoring them. Which configuration would best reduce alert fatigue while preserving useful warnings?

40 A steering committee wants to compare baseline dates with current forecast dates for major activities and quickly identify schedule slippage. Which visualization best supports this need?

41 A project has three non-critical activities that require the same specialist during the same week. Delaying any activity by one week has no immediate effect on the completion date, but their remaining total floats are 1, 3, and 5 weeks. If no other information is available, which allocation rule best protects the schedule from future disruption?

42 A work package requires 240 productive analyst-hours within three weeks. Each analyst is available for 40 hours per week, but historical data shows that meetings and support work consume 25% of available time. Assuming work is perfectly divisible, what is the minimum number of analysts required?

43 Activities A and B may start immediately and require the same sole engineer. A lasts 4 days and B lasts 3 days. Activity C lasts 2 days, uses another resource, and starts after A. The project finishes when both B and C are complete. Which resource-feasible sequence gives the earliest finish?

44 Two projects compete for one specialist. Project X gains if assigned now and loses per week of delay. Project Y gains if assigned now and loses per week of delay. Each assignment occupies the specialist for one week. Which sequence maximizes the combined realized benefit?

45 A resource and cost schedule has been approved, but procurement rates are commercially sensitive. Which publication approach best preserves control while meeting stakeholder information needs?

46 A technically valid network schedule becomes infeasible after scarce-resource limits are applied. Which sequence of scheduling operations most reliably preserves traceability between technical dependencies and resource-driven delays?

47 A monitoring framework defines metrics and reporting frequencies but repeatedly fails to trigger timely corrective action. Which missing element most directly explains the failure?

48 Three teams report weekly progress. Team A records status every Friday, Team B updates retrospectively on Monday, and Team C streams transactions continuously. Which control most improves comparability without discarding useful detail?

49 A dashboard shows 90% of activities complete, yet the forecast completion date is slipping. Which visualization would best reveal why activity-count progress is misleading?

50 A project reports and at the status date, but a critical supplier has announced a probable four-week delay that is not yet reflected in actual performance. What should the status report communicate?

51 A milestone was originally planned for day 80. Successive monthly forecasts predict completion on days 82, 86, and 91. The latest baseline still shows day 80. Which conclusion is best supported?

52 A project has paid , accrued unpaid work of , and issued non-cancellable purchase orders for of undelivered equipment. Which amount best represents the project's current cost exposure?

53 An approved scope change adds of work and two weeks to the schedule. Before approval, the project had unfavorable variances against the original baseline. How should the revised baseline be established?

54 A project can be shortened by up to three weeks. Each week of crashing adds in direct cost and saves in project-level indirect cost. After the second week, an additional coordination charge is incurred if a third week is crashed. Ignoring other effects, how many weeks should be crashed to minimize total cost?

55 A project has $BAC = $800,000$, $PV = , $EV = $360,000$, and $AC = . If current cost efficiency is expected to continue for the remaining work, what is the most appropriate estimate at completion?

56 A project has $BAC = $1,000,000$, $EV = , and $AC = $650,000$. What to-complete performance index is required to finish within the original budget?

57 An AI dashboard predicts completion dates from live issue, commit, and timesheet data. After the organization changes its issue-closing policy, predicted delays fall sharply even though delivery throughput is unchanged. What is the most likely control failure?

58 An AI notification system detects 95% of genuine schedule threats but sends so many false alerts that managers ignore it. Which redesign most directly addresses the operational failure while retaining risk sensitivity?

59 A project completion forecast is generated from a probabilistic model, but executives interpret the displayed date as a commitment. Which visualization best communicates forecast uncertainty without hiding the central estimate?

60 A project has $BAC = $2,000,000$, $EV = , $AC = $1,000,000$, and $PV = . Management expects the remaining work to be affected by both the observed cost and schedule inefficiencies. Using , what is the approximate estimate at completion?