EXIN DPMMPM Certification Sample Questions

01. A construction contractor's design team has agreed among itself that drawings below a certain size no longer need the independent peer check, because the check has become a bottleneck and the team's error rate is low.
The quality criteria agreed with the client before work began require an independent check on every drawing issued for construction. The project manager learns of the team's arrangement in passing at a site meeting.
How should the project manager treat the arrangement?
a) Hold the agreed criterion in force and work with the team on making the check itself faster.
b) Replace the team's arrangement with a working method set by the manager, since self-organisation has plainly produced the wrong result here.
c) Let the arrangement stand for the smaller drawings and record the departure from the agreed criterion in the risk register.
d) Ask the client to relax the criterion for the smaller drawings, so that the team's faster arrangement can continue.

02. A rail operator is replacing the ticket validators fitted to its fleet. The plan runs design, then build, then a six-week test phase at the end, and contains no other quality activity. The sponsor is comfortable because the test phase is long and properly staffed.
The acceptance criteria for the validators were agreed with the operations and revenue-protection departments before design began, and the test scripts are being written directly from those criteria.
Which analysis best identifies the weakness that remains?
a) The test scripts should be written by people independent of those who agreed the acceptance criteria, so the checking is not shaped by the same assumptions.
b) The six-week test phase is too short for a product of this kind and should be lengthened before the build gets under way.
c) Quality is checked only after everything has been built, so anything wrong in the early work surfaces at the point where correcting it costs the most.
d) No significant weakness remains, because the acceptance criteria were agreed up front and the tests are derived directly from them.

03. A vocational college has funded a project with one objective: to reduce the number of first-year students who withdraw before their second term. The deliverable chosen to achieve it is an early-warning dashboard that flags at-risk students to their tutors.
The dashboard now meets every criterion agreed for it. In the pilot, however, tutors acted on almost none of the alerts, telling the project that they have no allocated time in which to follow one up. The team wants to proceed to full rollout on the strength of the build criteria being met.
On what basis should the decision to proceed be settled?
a) Proceed with the rollout as planned, since the dashboard meets its agreed criteria and tutor workload is a line-management matter rather than a project one.
b) Treat the tutors' capacity to follow an alert up as part of what this project has to resolve.
c) Improve the alerts until tutors find them compelling enough to act on, and hold the agreed rollout date while that work is done.
d) Record the capacity gap as an open issue for the receiving department and complete the rollout on the schedule already agreed.

04. A national library service has given a project the objective of letting members reach its digital collections from any device without signing in. A standing information-governance rule, set outside the service and not open to change, requires an authenticated identity before any borrowing record is touched. The sponsor was unaware of the rule when the objective was written.
What does the objective now require?
a) Seek an exemption from the body that owns the rule, setting out the member benefit that the rule's current wording prevents the service from delivering.
b) Design the solution to sign members in silently in the background, so that the rule is satisfied while members experience the access the objective describes.
c) Deliver everything in the objective that does not touch a borrowing record, and record the remainder as descoped because an external rule prevents it.
d) Take the conflict to the sponsor with options for an objective the rule allows, so that the sponsor can restate what the project is for.

05. At a food processing company, a project to replace the labelling line control software has hit a defect in the supplier's product that stops one of two label formats printing. For five weeks the team has worked around it by producing that format on a standalone printer.
Handling the second format manually now consumes a shift's labour each day, and the workaround cannot cope once volumes rise for the seasonal peak in three weeks. The team leader raises the matter with the project manager for the first time today.
What does this situation most clearly illustrate?
a) That an issue was contained locally for so long that most of the time available to resolve it properly has gone.
b) That a defect in a supplier's product should have been recorded as a risk when the product was selected, rather than only once it had appeared in use.
c) That the workaround was the wrong technical choice from the outset, since a standalone printer was never going to sustain the volumes of a seasonal peak.
d) That the team leader had no authority to pursue a defect with the supplier and no route by which to bring it to anyone else's attention.

06. A retail chain has approved a project with a single stated objective: to improve the customer experience in its stores. The sponsor is enthusiastic, funding is in place, and the delivery team has been working for six months.
The sponsor and the project manager now disagree about whether the project is succeeding, and neither of them can settle the argument from anything that was written down at approval.
What is the defect in the objective as stated?
a) It depends on behaviour the delivery team does not control, since store staff determine most of what a customer experiences day to day.
b) It states no condition against which anyone can confirm that it has been achieved.
c) It is broader than the approved funding can support and should have been narrowed to a single region before the sponsor approved it.
d) It names a benefit rather than a deliverable, and a project objective has to be expressed as something the project will actually produce.

07. A hospital group is digitising its outpatient records. The delivery team reports that its test environment is refreshed from live data only once a fortnight, by a central IT function that sits outside the project. The team loses roughly a day and a half of every iteration rebuilding test cases against stale data.
The team has asked central IT twice and been told the refresh schedule is fixed by a standing policy. The project manager has authority over the project's own resources but none over central IT.
How should the project manager treat this?
a) As an impediment for the team to resolve internally, by writing test cases robust enough to tolerate data that is up to two weeks out of date.
b) As an impediment for the team to resolve itself, by negotiating a direct working agreement on refresh timing with the central IT function.
c) As a risk to iteration throughput, to be recorded with a planned response and reviewed at the end of each iteration alongside the other entries.
d) As a project issue to be pursued outside the team, since resolving it needs a change the team has no authority to make.

08. An agricultural co-operative is installing produce-grading equipment. A national certification scheme covering the grade it will handle is under review: if the scheme is confirmed early, the co-operative could sell into a premium channel from the first season, and if it is delayed the new equipment stands under-used.
The risk register carries one entry for this. It records the threat of delayed certification, assessed and accepted, with the response given as monitoring the certifier's published timetable.
What is the most significant weakness in how this uncertainty is being handled?
a) The favourable outcome has been left unplanned, so nothing is ready if certification arrives early.
b) The assessment rests on the certifier's published timetable rather than on the co-operative's own estimate of when the decision will actually arrive.
c) The response chosen is acceptance, when the exposure could be transferred to the equipment supplier through the terms of the delivery contract.
d) The certification decision has already been requested, which makes this an issue to be resolved now rather than a risk to be monitored.

09. In a hospital administration programme, the team changing outpatient scheduling needs a data extract that a separate reporting team owns and must build.
The scheduling team has added the extract to its own list of work for the coming period and is tracking it in exactly the same way as the items its own members will produce.
What distinguishes this item from the rest of the team's work?
a) It concerns reporting rather than scheduling, so it belongs with a different part of the product being delivered.
b) It has not been estimated by the people who will actually do it, so it cannot yet be given a place in the plan.
c) Its delivery depends on a team outside this one, so it has to be managed as a dependency rather than as work the team controls.
d) It carries more uncertainty than the team's other items and should therefore be recorded in the risk register instead of the plan.

10. A hotel group's booking-platform project began with one small delivery team. To go faster, the group kept adding people until the team numbered more than thirty, all working from a single backlog with one daily coordination meeting that now runs an hour. Output per person has fallen, and most of the discussion concerns dependencies between people who would otherwise rarely need to speak.
What does this pattern illustrate?
a) That a single backlog cannot serve a group of this size, and that the answer is to give each part of the work its own list of items.
b) That coordination effort grows faster than capacity as a team grows, so beyond a point each person added reduces the output the group actually gets.
c) That the daily meeting has been allowed to become a status report rather than a working session, which is why its length has grown in step with the number of attendees.
d) That the group added people without adding the supervisory structure needed to direct them, leaving everyone dependent on one coordination point.