PMP Project Management Professional Practice Questions — 10 Free (2026)

Which statement about the relationship between the process groups and the project phases is accurate?

• A. The initiating group applies only at the very start of a project, and it is never revisited once the project charter has been signed
• B. The process groups apply only to predictive projects, since adaptive projects have neither phases nor process groups
• C. The process groups are the same as the phases
• D. All of the process groups can occur within a single phase, and most phases involve repeated passes through them ✓
• E. Each phase corresponds to exactly one process group, so a five phase project passes through each group once

The groups are logical clusters of activity rather than sequential stages, and every one of the five can be exercised inside a single phase. Authorising a new phase brings the initiating group back into play. PMBOK Guide Sixth Edition, Section 1.2.4.2 Project Phase

Why is the will not have band of a MoSCoW list valuable even though nothing in it is being built?

• A. Because it makes the backlog look complete
• B. Because items in that band become the mandatory content of the immediately following release under the agreed rules
• C. Because the change control board is required to review that band before it can approve any request affecting the scope
• D. Because it records an explicit shared decision to leave items out of this delivery, which prevents them creeping back in ✓
• E. Because the cost of the excluded items must still be included in the budget in case the customer changes the decision later

Naming what is deliberately excluded is the same discipline as recording exclusions in a predictive scope statement. It closes off later assumptions. It carries no automatic entitlement to a later release and no budget obligation. Essential PMP Preparation, agile chapter on requirement prioritisation

A hybrid programme has a product owner, a project manager, a steering committee and a project management office. Confusion keeps arising over who may accept a completed feature. What is the most effective governance remedy?

• A. Let the project manager accept features and inform the product owner afterwards
• B. Give the product owner sole authority
• C. Raise the confusion as an issue and escalate it to the sponsor each time it arises, so that a consistent pattern of rulings gradually establishes who should be accepting the completed work
• D. Ask the steering committee to accept every feature at its monthly meeting
• E. Record the decision rights for acceptance in a responsibility assignment matrix agreed by all four parties ✓

Ambiguous decision rights are cured by writing them down in a matrix that the parties agree, which prevents the dispute recurring. Assigning the right arbitrarily, sending every feature upward, or accumulating rulings case by case all leave the ambiguity in place. PMP Certification Exam Content Outline July 2026, Domain III Task 1

A highly skilled specialist team consistently produces excellent results with very little supervision. Which leadership style is likely to suit the project manager's dealings with that team?

• A. Bureaucratic, requiring the team to follow the organisation's documented procedures exactly on every activity regardless of the specialist judgement involved
• B. Laissez-faire, staying out of the detail of the work while consulting as necessary ✓
• C. Autocratic direction of every task
• D. Driver, giving constant direction and using a competitive attitude to push the team towards outperforming the other teams working on the same programme
• E. Analytical, taking the technical decisions personally on the basis of the project manager's own knowledge and then communicating those decisions to the team

A hands off approach is appropriate where the team is highly skilled and motivated, because close direction adds no value and can reduce motivation. Autocratic direction, rigid procedural compliance, constant driving and centralised technical decision making all waste the team's capability in this situation. PMP Exam Study Guide, Chapter 9: Resources, Management and Leadership Styles

A programme has released a capability that nobody is using. Investigation shows the capability works exactly as specified. What is the most useful conclusion for the project manager?

• A. The users need more training
• B. The acceptance criteria were too loose and should be tightened before the next release goes out
• C. The requirement was satisfied but the underlying need was not understood ✓
• D. The quality control activity failed, since a deliverable nobody uses cannot be said to have passed inspection
• E. The benefits management plan was wrong and the benefit should be removed from the plan so that the reported figures for the programme are no longer distorted

Building the specified thing correctly while missing the real need is a validation failure, not a conformance failure. Quality control confirmed conformance correctly. Training may help at the margin, and deleting the benefit conceals the lesson rather than learning from it. PMP in Depth Third Edition, chapter on project integration management

A team asks why it should attend the sprint review when the product owner has already accepted every item during the iteration. What is the answer?

• A. The event gathers reactions from the wider group of stakeholders, which the product owner's acceptance does not supply ✓
• B. Attendance is required by the framework
• C. The event allows the scrum master to record which stakeholders attended so that engagement can be reported to the programme management office at the end of each iteration
• D. The event allows the product owner to confirm formally in front of stakeholders that she has accepted the items, which protects the team against later disputes about acceptance
• E. The event provides the team with an opportunity to explain the technical difficulties it encountered during the iteration so that stakeholders understand the effort involved

Acceptance by the product owner confirms that an item meets its criteria; the review exposes the increment to everyone whose reaction should influence what is built next, including people who will use it and who see things the product owner does not. That wider inspection is the value of the event and it cannot be obtained from a single acceptance decision. Agile Practice Guide, Section 5.2.5 Demonstrations and Reviews

An organization compares its own defect rates and cycle times against those achieved by leading firms in the same industry. Which technique is this?

• A. Statistical sampling of the output
• B. Cost benefit analysis, since the comparison establishes whether the improvement will be worth the investment it requires
• C. Quality audit, because an external standard is being applied to the processes that the organization currently uses in its work
• D. Benchmarking, which uses comparable practice elsewhere to set improvement targets ✓
• E. Design of experiments, because the comparison identifies which factors have the greatest effect on the observed results

Comparing performance against actual practice elsewhere in order to identify gaps and set targets is benchmarking. It informs planning rather than testing factors or costing options. PMBOK Guide Sixth Edition, Section 8.1.2.2 Data Gathering

A product owner asks the team to demonstrate a feature at the review that exists only as a clickable design mock. What should the scrum master point out?

• A. The product owner should obtain written stakeholder agreement to the mock before it is shown
• B. The demonstration belongs in the retrospective instead, so that design debate happens away from the wider audience invited to a sprint review
• C. Mocks may never be shown at a review
• D. A mock is not an increment, so showing it as delivered work corrupts the inspection the review exists to provide ✓
• E. The mock should be estimated in story points and added to the completed total for the iteration so that the effort invested in producing it is properly recognised

The review inspects a real increment so that stakeholders form an accurate view of progress and can adapt the backlog on that basis. A mock may legitimately be shown as a discussion aid, provided it is clearly identified as such, but presenting it among delivered work misleads the very inspection the event exists for. Counting it toward the completed total would compound the error. Agile Practice Guide, Section 5.2.5 Demonstrations and Reviews

A team agrees to try working in pairs to reduce defects. What should it decide at the same time, and why?

• A. How long the change will remain in place permanently
• B. Which member of the team will be responsible for reporting the change to the sponsor at the next governance review so that the record of process changes stays complete
• C. How the effect will be measured in the next period, because otherwise the team will never know whether the change helped and will keep it out of habit ✓
• D. Whether the change requires approval from the project management office before the team is permitted to depart from the standard process the organisation publishes
• E. Who is to blame for the current defect rate

An improvement adopted without a way of judging it becomes a habit rather than a decision. Choosing the measure at the moment the change is agreed lets the team validate it in the following period and keep, adjust or drop it on evidence. Approval routes and reporting duties do not answer whether the change worked. Agile Practice Guide, Section 5.2.1 Retrospectives

What most reliably indicates that an organization has genuine agility rather than agile teams?

• A. Its teams hold certifications
• B. Its delivery teams have adopted a named framework consistently across every part of the organization, including the functions that do not build products themselves
• C. Its funding, procurement and governance functions can change direction at the same speed the teams can ✓
• D. Its project management office has been renamed and restructured to reflect the terminology used by the frameworks the delivery teams have adopted
• E. Its executives attend the sprint reviews of the most significant products so that they can observe the increments being delivered by the teams concerned

A team that can change direction in two weeks is of no use if the money takes six months to move and the contract cannot be varied. Organizational agility is measured at the slowest of the surrounding functions, which is why the harder work of an adaptive transformation lies in finance, procurement and governance rather than in the delivery teams themselves. Agile Practice Guide, Section 6.8 Evolving the Organization