Project Planning, Scheduling, and Resourcing
Building the plan
Planning establishes the work breakdown: project → task (or work breakdown structure) → assignments. Candidates must understand task attributes (duration, effort, start/finish, dependency, parent-child rollup), effort-based versus duration-based scheduling, and the distinction between planned hours (the estimate) and assigned or booked hours (the commitment). Understand that assignments link a named resource or a generic role to a task for a date range, and that generic (placeholder) assignments must later be fulfilled by a real resource.
Scheduling mechanics
Know how dependencies constrain dates, how a task's effort is spread across its duration (contour or distribution), and why a resource's calendar and capacity affect feasible dates. Understand booking types - hard book, soft book, and proposed - and that only hard bookings consume capacity with certainty. Understand that changing a task's duration does not automatically change its effort unless the scheduling mode ties them.
Traps
Frequent errors: treating a soft booking as guaranteed capacity; assuming moving a parent task moves children automatically in all cases; confusing project calendar with resource calendar; and forgetting that a role-based assignment consumes no named person's capacity until fulfilled. Questions also test whether you know that reassignment preserves the assignment record history rather than overwriting it.
Rule of thumb
Plan top-down, resource bottom-up: estimate effort by role first, then match named people against real capacity. If a plan shows a resource over 100% in any week, the answer is usually to level by shifting dates or splitting the assignment - not to increase the resource's capacity.