You have no formal authority over the teams delivering your program, yet you must get their commitment. What is most effective?
- A. Remind them that the sponsor mandated the program
- B. Build relationships, align the work to their goals, and make the shared value and trade-offs visible ✓
- C. Escalate to their managers whenever they hesitate
- D. Track their tasks tightly and report misses upward
Correct answer: B. Influence without authority comes from relationships, aligned incentives and transparent value, not from mandate or surveillance.
Two of your programs are both behind, and you can only rescue one this quarter with the available budget. How do you decide?
- A. Save the one whose sponsor is most senior
- B. Assess which delivers greater strategic value and probability of recovery, and recommend that with clear rationale ✓
- C. Split the budget so both limp forward
- D. Save the one that is furthest along regardless of value
Correct answer: B. Portfolio-level calls weigh strategic value and recoverability, and the reasoning is made explicit to leadership.
Your project is on time and budget, but early signals suggest it will not actually move the business metric it was meant to. What do you do?
- A. Deliver on time and budget as agreed and declare success
- B. Raise the outcome risk with the sponsor and reassess whether the approach still achieves the intended benefit ✓
- C. Keep quiet since the metric is not your responsibility
- D. Change the success metric to one you will hit
Correct answer: B. Mature PMs manage to outcomes, not just on-time delivery, and surface benefit risk even when the triple constraint looks green.
A powerful executive keeps pushing a pet feature that data shows users do not want. How do you handle the HiPPO?
- A. Build it since they hold the budget
- B. Bring evidence and a small test to inform the decision, framing it around the shared goal ✓
- C. Refuse and cite the data flatly
- D. Build it but quietly deprioritise it and hope they forget
Correct answer: B. You counter HiPPO decisions by reframing around shared goals and letting evidence or a low-cost experiment inform the call.
Your team has been in crunch for months and morale is collapsing, but the deadline is fixed by a regulator. What is the wisest move?
- A. Keep pushing; the deadline is non-negotiable so there is no choice
- B. Rescope to the true regulatory minimum and protect the team, escalating trade-offs that remain ✓
- C. Add more people immediately to share the load
- D. Extend the deadline unilaterally to relieve pressure
Correct answer: B. With a fixed date, the lever is scope; you protect sustainable pace by cutting to the genuine must-haves and escalating the rest.
How should you measure the impact of a program that delivered a platform other teams build on?
- A. By the number of tasks and milestones your team completed
- B. By the downstream outcomes it enabled, tied to the original business case and adoption ✓
- C. By how much of the budget was spent
- D. By the volume of features shipped
Correct answer: B. Enabling programs are measured by the business outcomes and adoption they unlock, not internal output or spend.
A trusted senior engineer is quietly gold-plating their work, adding polish nobody asked for and slipping the schedule. How do you address it?
- A. Let it go because the quality is genuinely high
- B. Reconnect them to the priorities and definition of done, and agree what 'good enough' means here ✓
- C. Publicly call out the slippage in standup
- D. Remove them from the critical path entirely
Correct answer: B. Gold-plating is corrected by realigning the person to agreed priorities and a shared definition of done, respectfully and directly.
A vendor issue threatens your launch, and escalating will expose that you approved the vendor. Do you escalate?
- A. No; protect your reputation and try to fix it silently
- B. Yes; escalate promptly with the facts and options because the project outcome outweighs personal optics ✓
- C. Only if you cannot resolve it before anyone notices
- D. Escalate but frame it so the blame lands on the vendor
Correct answer: B. Escalation judgement puts the project's outcome above personal optics; delaying to protect yourself compounds the damage.
Two departments are locked in a turf conflict that is blocking your program, and both have legitimate concerns. What is the senior move?
- A. Pick the department with more political weight
- B. Facilitate a session to surface the real interests behind their positions and broker an option that serves the program goal ✓
- C. Escalate to force a top-down ruling immediately
- D. Wait for them to resolve it themselves
Correct answer: B. Deep conflicts are unblocked by getting beneath positions to underlying interests and brokering a goal-serving solution.
Leadership asks you to commit to an aggressive date publicly, but your analysis shows only a 40% chance of hitting it. What do you do?
- A. Commit to the date; leaders want confidence, not caveats
- B. Present the probability and the conditions or trade-offs that would raise it, and commit to a defensible plan ✓
- C. Refuse to give any date until certainty is high
- D. Privately plan for the realistic date while announcing the aggressive one
Correct answer: B. Senior PMs commit honestly, exposing the confidence level and the levers, rather than over-committing to a number they do not believe.
Your program's original business case assumptions are now clearly outdated. How do you handle governance?
- A. Keep delivering to the approved case to avoid reopening decisions
- B. Bring the revised assumptions back to the steering group to re-validate whether the program should continue, pivot or stop ✓
- C. Adjust the plan yourself based on the new assumptions
- D. Wait until the program ends to note the assumptions changed
Correct answer: B. When assumptions underpinning the case change materially, good governance means re-validating the investment decision, including stopping.
You must recover a red program a peer just handed you, with a team that has lost trust in leadership. Where do you start?
- A. Announce an aggressive new plan on day one to show control
- B. Rebuild an honest picture with the team, stabilise the top risks, then reset realistic commitments ✓
- C. Replace the people you think are underperforming
- D. Report green upward to buy time while you figure it out
Correct answer: B. Turnarounds start with an honest reassessment and rebuilding trust before making credible, realistic commitments.
A metric your program is optimising (tickets closed) is being gamed and no longer reflects real value. What is the right response?
- A. Keep the metric; it still looks good in reports
- B. Shift measurement to the underlying outcome the metric was a proxy for, and communicate why ✓
- C. Add more targets on top of the same metric
- D. Punish the teams that are gaming it
Correct answer: B. When a proxy metric becomes a target and is gamed, you refocus measurement on the true outcome it was meant to represent.
You realise cancelling your struggling project is likely the best decision for the business, though you have invested a year in it. What should you do?
- A. Keep going to honour the investment already made
- B. Present an objective recommendation to stop or pivot, ignoring the sunk cost ✓
- C. Slow-roll it quietly until leadership loses interest
- D. Push for more budget to give it one more chance
Correct answer: B. Sound judgement ignores sunk cost and recommends the option best for the business, even when it means stopping your own project.
A high-performing but abrasive tech lead is alienating the rest of the team and it is hurting delivery. How do you handle it?
- A. Tolerate it because their output is essential
- B. Give direct, specific feedback on the impact and set clear expectations, escalating with their manager if needed ✓
- C. Remove them quietly to keep the peace
- D. Reorganise the team so no one has to work with them
Correct answer: B. Difficult high performers require candid feedback on impact and clear expectations, not avoidance that lets the harm continue.
Your steering committee wants an optimistic narrative, but the program is genuinely at risk. How do you report?
- A. Give them the optimistic story they want to hear
- B. Present a clear-eyed status with risks and options, because their decisions depend on the truth ✓
- C. Soften the risks so much they seem trivial
- D. Only escalate once the risk has fully materialised
Correct answer: B. Governance bodies make decisions on your reporting, so integrity requires the honest picture even when it is unwelcome.
Adding a needed feature would require breaking a commitment you made to another team about a shared component. How do you decide?
- A. Break the commitment; your project's needs come first
- B. Talk to the other team to renegotiate transparently, weighing the program-wide impact before deciding ✓
- C. Add the feature quietly and deal with fallout later
- D. Drop the feature to avoid any conflict
Correct answer: B. Cross-team commitments are renegotiated openly with a view to the whole program's outcome, preserving trust and dependencies.
You suspect a dependency owner is over-reporting progress to avoid scrutiny, putting your milestone at risk. What is the best approach?
- A. Accept their status to keep the relationship smooth
- B. Ask for concrete evidence of progress and jointly verify the real state without accusation ✓
- C. Report them to their manager for lying
- D. Assume the worst and rebuild their part yourself
Correct answer: B. You de-risk questionable status by verifying against concrete evidence collaboratively, protecting both the milestone and the relationship.
A major risk has a low probability but would be catastrophic to the company if it hit. How should you treat it?
- A. Deprioritise it because it is unlikely
- B. Give it serious mitigation and contingency planning proportional to its severe impact ✓
- C. Ignore it since planning for it wastes effort
- D. Escalate it once and then consider it handled
Correct answer: B. Low-probability, high-impact risks warrant real mitigation and contingency because the consequence, not just the odds, drives the response.
Delivering the full scope on time would ship a mediocre product, while cutting scope would ship something genuinely valuable late. How do you frame the decision?
- A. Ship full scope on time; hitting the date is what matters
- B. Present the outcome trade-off to the sponsor with a clear recommendation grounded in delivered value to users ✓
- C. Cut scope unilaterally because quality matters most
- D. Let the team decide since they know the work best
Correct answer: B. The senior move frames it as an outcome trade-off for the accountable owner, anchored in real user value rather than defaulting to the date.