Project Management

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Ambiguous Question

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Umair Anayat Abbasi East Bunbury, WA, Australia
Project manager might need an information before he/she can approve the project charter. Specific information could be anything- meeting with the right people could be the answer but imagine asking project sponsor to approve the charter first to get the required answer. Thoughts?

A project manager is on a hybrid project. The project manager meets with the sponsor to get the project milestones. The sponsor requests for more specific information in the project charter.



How should the project manager respond to this request?


A.Provide the sponsor with a project charter from a similar project as a reference.
B.Meet with the project stakeholders to get the project schedule approved first.
C.Inform the sponsor that before detailed team planning can occur, the project charter needs approval first.
D.Invite the sponsor to the team retrospective meeting so the sponsor can get the information requested.

Solution: C. Inform the sponsor that before detailed team planning can occur, the project charter needs approval first



 



 
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Rami Kaibni
Community Champion
Senior Projects Manager | Field & Marten Associates New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada
Umair, regardless of where you got the question from, in my opinion, it is not a very well-structured question and the quality of the question itself is questionable for me.

In this situation, the most effective response is C because it reinforces the project management process and ensures that the project's foundation is solid before detailed planning begins.
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Kiron Bondale Retired | Mentor| Retired Welland, Ontario, Canada
Umair -

To add to Rami's feedback, this is a very common situation. Stakeholders would like things to progress quickly and sometimes that means they want to skip key aspects of project inception such as ensuring there is alignment on the purpose, high level scope and other aspects of a project.

Kiron
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Keith Novak Tukwila, Wa, United States
My advice is when the sponsor asks for more information, ask very specific questions to identify what is ambiguous. Making sure you are addressing the right problem will go a long way towards solving it.

There are a lot of problem solving models, but one thing they all share is first clearly defining the problem.

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