PMP Practice Question: People — Predictive, Hard
You are leading a 36-month manufacturing project with a geographically distributed team across four countries. A highly skilled subject matter expert (SME) based in Germany, who is critical to the design phase, has been underperforming for six weeks. Her work quality has declined, she misses virtual meetings, and other team members report communication difficulties. You learn through informal channels that she is dealing with a serious family health crisis but has not disclosed this officially. Your project is entering a critical phase where her expertise is essential, and replacing her would cause a 4-6 week delay. How should you handle this situation?
Study this topic
- 📖Emotional Intelligence for the PMP Exam 2026: Master the People Domain
Emotional intelligence accounts for crucial skills tested across the People domain (33%) in the 2026 PMP exam. Learn how EI appears in scenarios, key competencies, and proven study strategies.
- 📖Managing Project Team Performance and Accountability
Master the frameworks and techniques for driving team performance, establishing accountability, and creating high-performing project teams aligned with PMBOK 8th Edition principles.
- 🗂️Flashcards: Leadership, Team & Stakeholder Models
15 cards · quick recall practice
More People Questions
View all →You are leading a manufacturing facility construction project following a predictive lifecycle. The project team consists of 15 members, including contractors and internal staff. After three months of work, you receive feedback from several team members that the weekly status meetings are too long and not productive. Team members feel they spend too much time listening to updates irrelevant to their work. The meetings currently last 90 minutes and cover all work packages. What is the best approach to address this concern?
A cross-functional agile team is preparing for their next sprint. During sprint planning, the QA specialist expresses concern that the team has been committing to user stories without adequately considering testing effort. She feels that her input is often sought too late in the process, after developers have already estimated and committed to stories. This has resulted in quality issues and testing becoming a bottleneck in the last two sprints. The team wants to improve but is unsure how to better integrate QA perspective earlier. What should the team do?
Your organization is piloting agile practices within traditionally predictive portfolios. You're leading a hybrid project with a co-located agile team and distributed predictive workstreams across three continents. After four months, you notice the agile team has strong cohesion and high performance, but the distributed predictive teams report feeling disconnected and undervalued. Several key resources from the predictive workstreams have requested transfers, citing lack of engagement. Executive stakeholders are questioning whether the hybrid approach is sustainable. What is the MOST effective way to address this disparity?