Project Management and Delivery
Domain 7 - Project Management and Delivery
Expect questions on scope control, scheduling, risk, earned value, and how delivery is governed in agile and hybrid settings.
Core controls
Scope is baselined in a work breakdown structure; changes pass through change control with cost, schedule and quality impact assessed before approval - otherwise it is scope creep. A RACI matrix assigns roles, with exactly one accountable person per deliverable. Risks live in a register scored by probability times impact, each with an owner, a response (avoid, mitigate, transfer, accept) and a trigger. On the schedule, the critical path is the longest dependent chain and has zero float; any slip there moves the end date. Crashing adds resources at extra cost and is sometimes ineffective; fast tracking overlaps tasks and adds risk.
Earned value
PV is the planned value of work scheduled, EV the budgeted value of work performed, AC the actual cost. CPI = EV/AC (above 1 means under budget), SPI = EV/PV (above 1 means ahead of schedule), and EAC is commonly approximated as BAC/CPI. These are ratios, so always state the direction explicitly.
Worked example
Budget at completion 200k; 40% of work was planned by now (PV 80k); 36% is complete (EV 72k); actual spend is 80k. CPI = 72/80 = 0.90, so 10% over budget per unit of work; SPI = 72/80 = 0.90, so behind schedule. EAC is roughly 200/0.90 = 222k, a forecast overrun of 22k. The two indices happen to be equal here but measure different things - never report "CPI of 0.9 means we are late".
Delivery
Agile delivery uses a prioritized backlog, short iterations and a Definition of Done covering functional and non-functional criteria. Before go-live plan data migration, cutover rehearsal, UAT sign-off, rollback and hypercare; acceptance must rest on objective criteria agreed earlier.
Traps
- Confusing effort with duration, or planning resources at 100% allocation.
- Reading CPI and SPI backwards, or computing EV from self-reported percent complete.
- Fast tracking tasks that have no dependency to overlap.
- Declaring an increment "done" with no test or acceptance evidence.
- Approving scope changes informally and discovering the schedule impact at the end.