D · Delivery and ongoing operations

Project and PMO practice

Cadence, risk, change control, and cross-project coordination.

Classification boundary

Include: Include project cadence, status, risk, change, dependencies, and PMO coordination.

Choose a neighboring leaf when: Use problem decomposition for task breakdown and operations or reliability for ongoing service work.

This capability may appear in standards across different stages. Explore stage expectations

35 questions

Choose a group based on the evidence you need. Groups follow existing question formats, not difficulty or mandatory prerequisites. Each batch has up to eight questions.

Judgment and options32

Compare goals, constraints, options, and trade-offs.

Questions 1–8

Project requests backed by senior sponsors tend to move ahead, while compliance and infrastructure work without executive sponsorship repeatedly slips. How would you create a transparent portfolio intake and prioritization process?
A project depending on a platform interface is already integrating when the upstream team announces a semantic change this quarter and cannot support both formats indefinitely. How would you decide compatibility, migration order, and release boundaries across projects?
Four months after delivery, the targeted cost reduction has not appeared in financial reports. The sponsor says the system is still in a learning period, while finance considers the project closed. How would you clarify benefit ownership and the validation window?
After a strategic shift, several in-flight projects no longer support the new goals, but teams have invested effort and made external commitments. How would you decide what to stop immediately, what to close out, and how to transfer knowledge, contracts, and capacity?
A new regulatory requirement makes the original scope impossible, yet teams still cite old milestones. How would you update baselines, dependencies, and external expectations?
A project stays green until a critical data migration is found untested just before launch. How would you improve status signals and decision cadence?
Three projects independently build similar permission and notification capabilities, each seeming reasonable alone. How would you detect portfolio-level duplication and change governance?
Five projects flag the same platform dependency as a possible delay, yet each remains green. What evidence would tell you to change the portfolio instead of following up project by project?

Questions 9–16

Two weeks before launch a stakeholder asks for one more feature. How do you decide to accept, defer, or decline, and what do you record?
A business lead says change approval slows market opportunities and asks teams to insert requests outside review. Past urgent work has caused rework. How would you design an exception path?
A release date has been promised externally, but teams keep requesting features and fixes. How would you decide when to freeze scope, which exceptions to allow, and who owns replanning consequences?
Engineering tells you that, because of the underlying architecture, the feature you specified will slip two weeks, while the business side wants it tomorrow. How do you cut half the features in a short time and keep a minimum viable version that can ship, and what do you rely on to decide what stays and what goes?
How do you measure engineering effectiveness? Which metrics do you choose, how do you keep the numbers from being gamed, and how do you turn the measurement into real improvement?
You are leading a project across engineering, design, and operations. How would you clarify the shared goal and responsibilities when each group defines success differently?
A key vendor has delayed an interface twice, but the project plan still uses the original date. Internal teams are building a temporary adapter in parallel. How would you reset the baseline, account for added work, and show leadership which commitments remain credible?
Two projects' schedules collide and both need the same people. What do you do, how do you turn the conflict into options that can be discussed, and how do you get both sides to accept the result?

Questions 17–24

Three weeks into a project you find two risks nobody owns. How do you make them manageable?
Five projects each look reasonable by their own value ranking, but they share three sequential dependency teams and cannot finish within the quarter. How would you identify portfolio bottlenecks, resequence work, and decide whether to split delivery?
A business sponsor leaves before a project is complete; the replacement values different measures, yet the team continues spending to the old plan. How would you reconfirm benefit assumptions, ownership, and continuation criteria?
Project plans list dependent teams but no delivery owners or confirmed dates; each project looks feasible alone, while the portfolio may compete for the same capacity. How would you build dependency commitments and a risk view?
Several projects use budget and time as planned, but key business outcomes show no visible change; status reports mainly count completed tasks. How would you redefine portfolio progress measures and support resource changes?
A project has requirements, design, testing, and launch reviews, but complete documents do not prove key assumptions; risks often surface only in the meeting. How would you make stage gates real decision checks?
A vendor failure blocks a critical project. Business, Engineering, Legal, and Finance need information, but several status meetings delay action. What information would you send to whom, and in what order, to identify a decision owner and next steps quickly?
Halfway through a project, several stakeholders keep adding important requests while the launch date and team capacity stay fixed. How would you establish change decisions and keep scope, risk, and commitments transparent?

Questions 25–32

The plan calls for a full launch by quarter end, but core data authorization and compliance review are unresolved. How would you set stage gates so preparation can continue without creating irreversible investment before key conditions are met?
Several departments share a project, and no one owner can allocate all resources. Issues stay in meeting notes without anyone confirming the decision. How would you clarify decision rights, escalation, and follow-up?
The main feature is live, but edge cases, operating documentation, and one downstream integration remain unfinished. The team wants to close and free capacity; the business worries the leftovers will be orphaned. How would you decide closure criteria and assign follow-up ownership?
A project is nearly complete, but the business sponsor has left and the receiving team has no clear owner. How would you handle acceptance, handoff, and unresolved risk?
Three projects need an integration environment that cannot be shared concurrently. Release dates are close and they depend on the same test team. How would you set scheduling rules and contingencies?
Scope is frozen and acceptance is underway when compliance identifies a new mandatory requirement. Releasing as planned creates audit risk. How would you respond?
Engineering reports risk weekly, while the monthly business dashboard remains green and leadership commits resources based on it. How would you align reporting semantics?
The feature shipped as planned, but approval came after the enrollment season, so meaningful use waits six months. How would you review commitments, critical path, and staged delivery?

Experience and reflection3

Use past facts to examine contribution, results, and learning.

Questions 1–3

The organization requires every project to use the same weekly reports, reviews, and approval gates; a small exploratory effort now spends more time reporting than executing. How would you design tiered governance without missing high-risk work?
A new service launches on schedule, but the project team is moving to other goals; on-call ownership, documentation, cost monitoring, and follow-up improvements have no clear owners. How would you determine whether the project is ready to hand off?
What was the biggest challenge in this project? Why was it hard, how did you push it forward at the time, and how did it end?

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