There are five Scrum values that all project team members, including the project manager (Scrum Master), strive to adhere to on a Scrum project.
Core Value 1 – Commitment
Each team member commits to the team, to each other, and to achieving the goal of each sprint.
Core Value 2 – Focus
The team focuses on the task at hand (avoiding the dangers of multi-tasking) and on the goals of the sprint.
Core Value 3 – Openness
The team is open and transparent – they share information freely and ask for help when they need it.
Core Value 4 – Respect
The team respects each other as capable, independent people.
Core Value 5 – Courage
The team has the courage to do the right thing, work through tough problems, ask for help if needed or say when they don’t know.
The Core Values of a Scrum Team
These core values of Scrum help hold a team together and form a contract (like a Team Charter) that creates a solid foundation as you work together towards your goals.
In this series we will walk through five PMP Practice Exam Questions each day – a great way to set up your morning as you prepare to pass the PMP Exam. It is also useful for the CAPM exam, as the content is very similar.
We will also figure them out together, and you’ll see the thought process behind solving these PMP exam questions.
I hope you enjoy!
Question 1
You have started to notice the impact that team motivation has on your project results. If you are giving your team love, affection, acceptance, friendship, you are using their:
A) Legal Needs
B) Social Needs
C) Wealth Needs
D) Organisational Needs
Question 2
You are working on a project where a strict and powerful union for the employees ensures that no employee can work more than 37 hours a week. This is an example of:
A) Project permissions
B) Project regulations
C) Project constraints
D) Project laws
Question 3
You are working on an Agile project and have been asked to create a document that lists team principles, agreements, and guidelines about the acceptable behaviour by team members. What are you working on?
A) The Team Guideline
B) The Project Management Plan
C) The Project Charter
D) The Team Charter
Question 4
You are managing a project team and need to ensure your team members are doing what is needed to get the job done. What is a project document you will use that helps you know the effectiveness of the team?
A) Team Performance Assessments
B) Team Progress Assessments
C) Team Presentation Assessments
D) Team Achievement Assessments
Question 5
A project manager will spend up to 90% of their time communicating, and your interpersonal skills will directly or indirectly impact the outcome of your project. Which of the following is a type of interpersonal skill?
A) Selling
B) Converting
C) Team building
D) Physical skills
This one is really fantastic because it looks into forecasting and maybe figuring out whether we want to spend money on a particular project or on another particular project. It really gets into into the meat of it before you kick off or initiate your project, and that’s what makes it really really great to learn about and to know about these forecasting techniques.
Using Future Value, Net Present Value, and Internal Rate of Return
For your project returns, there are many different ways to forecast these these things and as you initiate your project you may need to show your stakeholders the potential benefit that might come out of your project or what you’re going to deliver. Are you delivering a million dollars, or is it something else in benefit – maybe it’s customer value or customer goodwill as some soft benefits. Or is it some amount of value over time, potentially every month or every year for example.
To do this there are three common methods of forecasting that you will see on the PMP exam and in your project management career as well. You’ve got Future Value (FV) where we’re looking at what the value of a dollar today is in the future. Net Present Value (NPV where we’re looking at what the total outcome of our project three years into the future is, what that’s actually worth today. And our Internal Rate of Return (IRR), where if we’re delivering a million dollars over three years, what’s the actual percentage return in today’s figures?
For all of these on your PMP exam you really just need to choose the highest for each of them – so Net Present Value if you’ve got a choice between a hundred thousand dollars and a hundred and twenty thousand dollars, you choose the hundred and twenty thousand dollar one. It’s the same with Future Value – choose the highest future value, and choose the highest percentage for your Internal Rate of Return.
We’re also going to show you how to calculate these, just so know them, and it’s a little bit of fun as well.
Future Value
Future value asks “What would our money be based on a certain rate of return?” For example an interest rate, if we’re earning five percent a year or ten percent a year, in this example our future value equals our current (present) value multiplied by 1 plus our interest rate (so 1 plus 0.10 for example so it ends up as 1.10) to the power of the time – so in this case we’ve got three years. Let’s look at this example.
The value of a thousand dollars, in three years time, at ten percent interest.
We’ve got a thousand dollars, times 1.1 – so 10 percent (0.10) is our interest plus 1, to the power of 3. “To the power of” means 1.1 times 1.1 times 1.1, that’s three times we multiply those by each other. And that ends up to be 1.331 when you multiply all of those together. So we end up with a thousand times 1.331 and that gives us our future value of 1331. That’s how we figure out the future value at a certain rate of return.
Let’s say our project is going to give us a return of 10 per year, that’s very promising and that’s our potential return. We can do this the other way as well. We could say if we’ve got 1331 dollars in the future, and we want to figure out what that’s worth today then we actually just use divide instead of multiplication. So we just we go 1331 divided by 1.331 or our 1.1 times 1.1 times 1.1, and that will give us a thousand dollars in today’s value. So that’s how we do that looking backwards, and that’s important because that’s what we’re going to use for our Net Present Value.
Net Present Value
Now you might see this come up in financial accounting and statistics and that sort of thing, it’s a really cool technique to figure out what the project returns would be worth today, versus a certain rate of return and the future cash flows that we’re going to get out of our project.
Net present value equals the cash flow of year 1, divided by 1 plus our internal rate of return (which is our interest rate) and again, this is sort of foreshadowing for our next one which is the internal rate of return, but let’s say it is in this case 10 percent again. So it’s a 0.10, and we’ve got 1.1 again. So looking at the example we’ve got cash flow in year one or month one or whatever the the actual time frame is (it’s your choice), we’ve got $500 and we’re dividing that (now we’re looking backwards) instead of multiplying it, so we divide it by 1.10 and that gives us 454.
Great! Very easy. Now we’ve got our second year, or our second month or our second day, with $500 again. Now we divide that by 1.10 to the power of 2, so it’s 1.10 times 1.10 which equals 1.21. Then 500 divided by 1.21 gives us 413, and so on and so on, to the power of 3, to the power of 4, to the power of five – you could do as many of these as you see fit. You add them all together and then you minus the initial investment (we invested a thousand dollars into this project) because that’s a cost to us, it’s not a benefit that we’re getting. And all in all we get 243 dollars.
Now of course in the real world this might be 243,000 dollars, or 243 million dollars. Whatever size project you’re working with, or if it’s a personal project maybe it is 243 and that’s wonderful. But any positive return, that’s what we’re looking for, and the higher the better as we said.
Internal Rate of Return
Which brings us to the Internal Rate of Return. The Internal Rate of Return naturally flows here because we’re using the Net Present Value again, except what we’re doing now is we’re trying to figure out what that Internal Rate of Return is. It’s that interest rate we’re trying to figure out, usually through trial and error. So basically we have to figure out what that rate of return is, and we go up a little bit, down a little bit until we get to the stage where it’s the percentage that makes our Net Present Value equal zero, or as close to zero as we possibly can.
So again, the higher the Internal Rate of Return the better. Let’s go through an example just so it’s not too confusing. The initial outlay for our project is a thousand dollars, and we send that out to create our project – that’s our cost, so minus a thousand dollars. And then what we’re doing is we’re adding all of the benefits to that over time, so in this case we’ve got 400 cash flow, 400 cash flow, 400 cash flow coming in for each time period – let’s just call it every year. Let’s say we’ve got three years and each of those years we’ve got 400 coming in.
Now remember we’re doing that “dividing” instead of multiplying, because we’re trying to figure out the current value of these future cash flows. So using that dividing instead of multiplication. Let’s go through it. We’ve got 400 divided by 1.10 – we’re going to have a guess and say 10 percent is our is our interest rate – and that gives us 363. Now 1.1 to the power of 2 (so 1.1 times 1.1) equals 1.21, so 400 divided by 1.21 is 330. And so on and so on – again we could do this for as many time periods as we want – and then the next one to the power of three for our third year gives us 300.
So minus a thousand, then we’re adding 363, adding 330, and adding 300, and that gives us 993 which is just shy of a thousand so that’s that’s really close now we could fiddle around with this a little bit if we wanted to, we could say maybe it’s going to be a higher percentage maybe it’s 1.11 maybe it’s 1.12, or maybe we go the other way and we try and figure out which way do we need to go to get the closest percentage, to get it as close to 0 or just above as possible.
And that is our internal rate of return, remembering that when you get the question on the exam you might have three projects, one with an internal rate of return of 10 percent one with 12 and one with 15 percent, and for our purposes we want to choose the highest internal rate of return.
And these are all of the forecasting project return techniques that you will see on your exam and in your project management career.
These are extremely useful to know if you are working on or within a project using Agile or Scrum.
Step 1
The product owner (representing the customer or end user) creates a prioritised list of everything the project might deliver.
This list is called the prioritised product backlog.
Step 2
The team and the Product Owner have a sprint planning meeting. The team decides how much work it can take on in the next sprint.
The team pulls requirements from the prioritized product backlog that it can achieve in the sprint. This work becomes the sprint backlog.
Step 3
The team decides who will do what and creates the task cards in the sprint backlog for the current sprint.
The team will meet each day for a 15-minute meeting, called the daily scrum (also called a stand-up), to share progress updates.
Step 4
The project manager, called the Scrum Master, helps keep the team working toward the sprint goal.
They remove blockers, bring people in to the whole team approach, and facilitate progress.
Step 5
A sprint review happens at the end of each sprint to demonstrate what the team has accomplished to the product owner.
Step 6
After the sprint review the team participates in a sprint retrospective to discuss what did or did not work in the last sprint.
This gives the Scrum Master and the team an opportunity to adjust the processes and work for the next sprint.
Step 7
The whole process repeats itself by the project team selecting the next chunk of prioritized requirements from the backlog and getting to work in the next sprint.
Implementing Scrum
Implementing Scrum in an organization can be tricky, especially if no one in the organisation or team have done it before.
Show the value of Scrum through the results you get by using it, and more and more people will be interested in adopting the Scrum approach.
“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” – Zig Ziglar
Have you heard this leadership quote?
Zig Ziglar was an American author, salesman, and motivational speaker who lived from 1926 to 2012. He recorded one of the greatest sales training videos of all time in 1982 called “The Secrets of Closing the Sale”, from which many sales teachers have since garnered their methods.
It’s Time To Get To Work
Zig Ziglar here is talking about making a start, taking some action. This is really excellent advice but, as anyone struggling with uncertainty or procrastination knows, it is easy to say and tough to do.
But there is a magic in starting, and it is this: When you start to do something, to create something or to put things out there in the world, people will respond. Maybe it’s not a lot of people at first, but even with a small few you can gather the feedback you need to improve.
By starting, you are discovering where your best results will be. You can follow the clues of what your customers respond to, what they buy, or what they watch or read. And when you adjust based on those clues, you are one step closer to success.
That is the road to greatness
Which is why Zig is saying you have to start to be great. That starting, creating, and adjusting is what leads you to greatness if you never, ever give up. But hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of dreams have been lost thanks to people talking a good game but never taking action or seeing it through.
How many times has someone said, when talking about something at a party “I had that idea, that is now worth a million dollars (or more).” Whether it was a product, a business, a movie idea or something else, the fact that they had the idea is completely worthless unless they also had the work ethic and discipline to take action.
So what ideas do you have? And isn’t it about time you to that first, small step?
In this series we will walk through five PMP Practice Exam Questions each day – a great way to set up your morning as you prepare to pass the PMP Exam. It is also useful for the CAPM exam, as the content is very similar.
We will also figure them out together, and you’ll see the thought process behind solving these PMP exam questions.
I hope you enjoy!
Question 1
You have been asked to prepare a document to gain the project sponsor’s sign off to access their function’s resources, that details the project goal and business case, high-level scope and requirements, high level dates and milestones, a high-level budget, and initial risk analysis. What are you creating?
A) Project Management Plan
B) Project Charter
C) Risk Management Plan
D) Lessons Learned
Question 2
You are working with the quality assurance manager of your project, where they are using a fishbone diagram to perform a cause and effect analysis for a problem you are working on to solve. What else is a fishbone diagram called?
A) Ishikawa Diagram
B) Value Stream Map
C) Pareto Diagram
D) Control Chart
Question 3
You are working in the quality assurance and testing phase of your project, where the test manager makes use of many different ways to assess project quality control. Who has the most responsibility for project quality control?
A) The vendor
B) The functional manager
C) The project manager
D) The project sponsor
Question 4
Your quality assurance manager on your project is using a technique in order to validate the scope and gain sign off on the deliverables. What is it called when they check the quality of the product against the quality requirements?
A) Checking
B) Assessment
C) Evaluation
D) Inspection
Question 5
You have noticed your project team starting to drift off, miss deadlines and make quality defects, and decide to learn a skill that will help bring the team together again. What will you research for information on how people, teams, and organizational units function in a project?
A) Organizational Process Assets
B) Organizational Theory
C) Organizational Charts
D) Organizational Structure
In this series we will walk through five PMP Practice Exam Questions each day – a great way to set up your morning as you prepare to pass the PMP Exam. It is also useful for the CAPM exam, as the content is very similar.
We will also figure them out together, and you’ll see the thought process behind solving these PMP exam questions.
I hope you enjoy!
Question 1
You are working as a project manager and you need a source of information and knowledge on a product to ensure project success. You recognise this as “Expert Judgement” from the PMBOK Guide. What is the first place you should look for expert judgment?
A) The vendor’s organization
B) Hire someone outside your organization
C) Your own organization
D) Ask the Government
Question 2
Planned Value is the dollar value of the work you have planned to have completed at a given time in your project. Your project has a budget of $10,000. 40% of the work has been completed against planned 30%, and $14,000 has been spent so far. What is the Planned Value (PV)?
A) $700
B) $1,200
C) $200
D) $3,000
Question 3
You have been asked to use an estimation technique that uses data from past projects to budget for an activity that is very similar in nature and duration. What is this type of estimating technique?
A) Corresponding Estimating
B) Analogous Estimating
C) Parallel Estimating
D) Symmetrical Estimating
Question 4
You are working on a project with a budget of $10,000. 30% of the work has been completed against planned 40%. $15,000 has been spent so far. What is the Estimate at Completion (EAC), if the CPI is expected to be the same?
A) $50,000
B) $15,000
C) $150,000
D) $45,000
Question 5
You are working on a project with a budget of $10,000, where 50% of the work has been completed, against a planned 40%. $7,000 has been spent so far. What is the Schedule Performance Index (SPI)?
Welcome! Let’s look at the key concepts from the PMBOK guide. In project integration management, when we start off with the project charter, the business case is one of the biggest things that feeds into that project charter. It’s the very first step that we’re looking at.
What is a business case?
The approved business case is a business document most commonly used to create our Project Charter which is that very first step in the PMBOK guide process groups. The business case describes the necessary information from a business standpoint to determine whether the expected outcomes justify the required investment. It’s our basic cost vs. benefits – we’re asking and analysing “Do they weigh up?”
That’s why our business case is commonly used for decision-making by managers or executives above the project level, for example the project sponsor who ultimately will potentially fund this project or at least provide the resources in their part of the organization to proceed with the project.
How do we create a business case?
There are a few things that we can do and the first is to research or analyze any of the following below just to see if that investment is going to be worthwhile. It may sound simple but you do have to do the legwork, you have to actually do a little bit of mathematics, and probably a bit of research to figure out if it’s going to be worthwhile.
You could research any of these things, for example the market demand. Out there in the world are our customers saying that this is exactly what they’re wanting? Then maybe that’s what we’re going to create.
Is there an organizational need? Maybe we’re wanting to combine a few departments, maybe the company is downsizing or maybe it’s growing and you need to create a new department and all of a sudden that requires resources, processes and things to be set up, and that could be a project that needs to be kicked off.
Customer requests, for example let’s say you work at YouTube and you’re seeing customer feedback who really want this feature, and everyone is requesting it all the time. Then maybe we want to check whether that’s worthwhile, how much is it going to cost? And we put a business case forward to get it approved.
Legal requirements, if you’re working in financial services or maybe you’re working in health there’s always legal requirements. There might be royal commissions, for example the government making changes to the legalities around your profession and that requires you to make a change. That also requires you to see whether it’s worthwhile and create a business case.
Ecological impacts, where we want to reduce the paper or we want to reduce our carbon footprint. Do we want to look better towards the market because we’re a better ecological company? What do we need to do, is it worthwhile? Can we spend the dollars and can that give us an outcome that’s worthwhile?
Social need, where recently the COVID response and the social need and the vaccines that need to be created, those are projects. How much do they cost? Do they need government funding? Is that cost going to be worth the effort for that particular vaccine, or maybe there are a hundred different vaccines on the cards and so which one is the most worthwhile? Which one is going to be worth vetting for that investment? That’s where the research comes in, and that’s your business case.
Lastly once we’ve done all that research, we simply write the case, which is a short document outlining what we have found.
There are things that will impact the business case, such as enterprise environmental factors which are the way an organization actually works. Is the work done by conversations in the hallway? Or is it done by this approving manager? Or is it done by a project management office? Does it have to go through the proper governance, through this particular area, what are the actual enterprise environmental factors of the company that you’re working in and how does work get done? Make sure you know.
Organizational process assets are things like templates that are accepted practice, and a business case has to be done in that particular template. Many companies work this way.
Lastly we make a recommendation based on our research. If it’s only going to cost a hundred thousand dollars to do it but we’re going to make five million then I think this is something that we would hopefully approve based on that investment and that potential return. We look to put that into our project charter and initiate our project.
We’ve previously looked at the different environments that projects might operate in, and the types of projects that will happen and occur. We’ve looked at the reasons for initiating those projects and many other things in the lead up to the start of a project. Now we’re looking at the role of a project manager, and this is so important because the project manager ultimately is the glue that gels everything together and helps deliver that business value through a project. In other words the project manager plays a critical role in the leadership of a project team in order to achieve those project objectives.
The project manager the role also changes to fit an organization. There’ll be many different project types and styles, and many different organizational ways of working. This includes varying degrees of authority and responsibilities depending on the type of organization.
We might have things like working before the project initiation, for example tailoring the ideas to executives, coming up with a business case to help initiate that project and start with a Project Charter. After the project happens we might be measuring business benefits and making sure that we’ve actually delivered what we said we were going to deliver, and that we got the business value that we said we were going to get.
This is before and after, not to mention all the things that go on during the execution and planning, monitoring and controlling of the project itself. There’s a great analogy that the PMBOK guide gives us, and that is likening the Project Manager role to an orchestra. For example, in an orchestra your overall objective is to play beautiful music or a beautiful song. With a project it’s not a song but you’re delivering value to your audience and to your customers – simiarly an orchestra is helping change their mood you’re making them melancholy or making them excited or happy through your music. You’re delivering business value through a project but you you need someone to manage that entire Orchestra, and to manage that entire project team. You’re not going to do it all alone, you’re not going to do it by yourself.
As the project manager you’re going to have team leaders for each different section in the same way that you’ve got a trumpet section, a saxophone section, a timpani or drums or percussion section, and then the actual instruments themselves playing that music. Just like the team members within your project teams leading up to the project manager that are delivering your business value. The project manager also helps to find those roles, for example those team leader roles, the roles that you know you will need to deliver that value within the project, securing those team members and helping fulfill those project objectives and we do that initially through the project Charter, which is a document that helps build a business case, an initial idea, the reason why we’re starting the project, the initial stakeholders, initial risks and maybe even a potential small amount of scope, a small flightplan idea to kick off a project and initiate that project.
Then we actually run the project through the Project Management Plan. This document gets baselined for a snapshot or a moment in time and then it gets adjusted as the project goes along, to how things are going. Like the orchestra, a large project might have more than a hundred project team members and it’s all led by the project manager. They need to coordinate those team members who may fulfill many different roles, in different industries such as IT, design, development, communications, testing and you’ve got the integration of these environments.
All of those things need to be thought of and aligned when you’re in the project manager role.
Even though a project manager doesn’t need all of that actual information themselves – they don’t need to be able to play every single instrument – it does have help to have a little bit of technical knowledge. For example, the conductor will need to know how to read music, and they’ll need to know if someone’s going too fast too slow, or is in the right section or the wrong section at a given time. So for that they need a little bit of technical knowledge about the environment that they’re in, whether it’s IT, or in construction, or in automotive. Along with that technical knowledge, even though it doesn’t have to be vast, part of it is influencing, communicating and managing. All of that is basically what we would call leading, and leadership as a project manager is to help make those things happen.
Sometimes you have to cajole people into trying to do these things, maybe it’s not their usual job but you do need them to get things done even though you’re not their usual manager. It can be very difficult. But these are the skills that you need.
For those reasons the project manager is quite a different role to other functional managers. For example, you’ve got your functional manager who might provide oversight for a functional business unit, and this is just the usual BAU, business as usual. There’s an Operations Manager who is responsible for ensuring that business operations are efficient. Operations managers really are streamlining things and helping things run as best as they possibly can. The project manager being on a project that takes us from one state to another desired state (hopefully better) and a project manager is assigned to lead the team responsible for delivering that change in business value.
“A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame, and a little less than his share of the credit.” – John Maxwell
Have you heard this leadership quote from John Maxwell?
John Maxwell is an American author, speaker, and pastor who has written many books, including “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership”, selling millions of copies around the world.
Often, Good Leadership is Quiet
Here’s an interesting fact – in Jim Collins’ book “Good to Great” he studied the best performing companies over a long period of time – spanning more than fifteen years. What he found at the top of every single outperforming company was a leader who wasn’t “showy” or “full of bravado”. Instead they were quiet, reserved, and disciplined. They knew what had to be done but they didn’t make a big song-and-dance about it. He called them Level Five leaders.
And most often – even though their quality of leadership was found at every outperforming company – they deferred the success and winnings of their company to the people and the teams within it.
These top level leaders took a little more than their share of the blame when things went wrong, and gave a lot more than their share of the credit when things went right.
John Maxwell has studied leadership for more than forty years, and he has found the same truths as Jim Collins. He has found that the really great leaders – ones that can also be measured in terms of an outstanding financial return for their company – took the blame so they could improve themselves and the process to make things better.
You see, when you pass the blame to someone else, you’re also giving your power away.
You’re saying “It’s their fault,” which may sound nice to you in the short-term, but in reality it also means you don’t have to change or improve, and you also don’t have the power to change or improve because it’s that other guy’s fault.
Taking the blame when things go wrong means you also take responsibility for the improvements, and it is that mindset that build the most top-level leaders and gave the most top-level returns.
PMP Exam Question Session 13
Project Return Forecasting
PMP Exam Question Session 12
PMP Exam Question Session 11
The Business Case
The Skills of a Project Manager