(APM PRINCE2 Sample Exam Questions)

APMP For PRINCE2 Practitioners – Exam Hints and Tips

General
 What is a Project and what is Project Management?

 Understanding Programme Management and Portfolio Management

 The benefits of managing groups of projects within an organisation

 The important factors of a project’s context and their impact

 Understand stakeholder management

Strategic
 Performance indicators and their application to project success factors

 Health and Safety and Environment standards applicable to the Project Manager

Control
 Breakdown structures and their relationship with each other

 Scheduling techniques for projects

 Resource allocation techniques

 Resource histograms and ‘S’ curves

 Cost management – methods & reasons

 Earned Value Management

 Communication methods

Technical
 The different estimation methods  Estimating work effort, duration and cost effort

Commercial
 Purchasing and contracting methods

 Outlining the principles of managing suppliers and contractors

Organisation and Governance
 Project lifecycles

 Handover and closeout

Organisational
 Project life-cycle and extended project lifecycle

 The hand-over and close-out process

 Post project review and the project life-cycle

 The different types of project organisation and their advantages and disadvantages

People
 Communicating methods

 Identifying the needs of teams

 The different types of teams and their social roles

 How to build and motivate a team

 Leadership qualities

 Conflict management

 Negotiation techniques

APMP For PRINCE2 PRacttioners Exam Hints and Tips

Most people would agree that taking any examination including the APMP exam, is a nerve racking and stressful experience especially when their job, salary increase, or promotion prospects rely on a successful exam outcome.

From my experience, you will find the following advice consisting of hints and tips to be invaluable. Feel free to tailor them or use them as they are to suit your own exam experience, writing style or other preferences.

Your study and revision time including training should be planned well in advance so that taking the exam is not a last minutes rush.

It is very easy to put off study due to work or personal/home pressures and commitments, so get a plan together and agree it with those who need to support it.

This may mean for example that when you return home after work, the agreement is that you can put aside two hours for study during the week and 8 hours spread over the weekend.

There is a huge amount of knowledge to absorb for the examination and whilst you may already have some experience there are bound to be some areas where your knowledge is lacking in part or in full.

Make yourself a revision plan and stick to it. If you are having a break between your course and the examination use the time wisely.

The focus of revision is to learn and study that which you don’t know. This is a difficult and sometimes depressing activity. There is no point to continually practicing the topics you can do well, for although this is very comforting, it won’t help you in the exam if you haven’t revised the topics you don’t know.

If you find one topic is just too hard then give it up and move on to another.

You will be examined on 16 topics from 37 and you need to know about 6 of them, so you can realistically expect to ignore a couple of topics completely.

Remember, every time you say “I won’t bother with this topic” you are saying to yourself “I’ve got to answer 10 from 15, or 14 or 13 or 12 etc.”, depending how many you ignore.

Try to spend between one and two hours a day revising. This may mean altering the family arrangements for a short period but it will be worth it in the end.

Most people would agree that taking any examination including the APMP exam, is a nerve racking and stressful experience especially when their job, salary increase, or promotion prospects rely on a successful exam outcome.

From my experience, you will find the following advice consisting of hints and tips to be invaluable. Feel free to tailor them or use them as they are to suit your own exam experience, writing style or other preferences.

Examination Time Management

Within the 2 hours you have to complete 6 questions and that equates to 15 minutes per question plus 30 minutes reading and planning time.

A common failing in an examination is to run out of time.

You must discipline yourself to spend a maximum of 15 minutes on each question.

If you find yourself struggling on a particular question, It is far better to move on to the next question and score lots of marks on that new question.

As an example of time management, If a question asks for an explanation that requires 5 points to be made then that equates to 3 minutes per point made.
If the question has two or more parts then the marks will be split between them and each 10 marks is worth 3 minutes of your time.

Thus answering the questions will take two and a half hours. The remaining thirty minutes should be used firstly to read the paper thoroughly and select your ten questions – say ten minutes.

Use a further ten minutes to read through your answers, which leaves ten minutes to quickly review what you have written and add any quick sentence if it occurs to you.

Use the “80/20” Rule

Remember 100% or 55% still result in a pass. The exam is not graded.

There is no need to get every question 100% correct; neither should you aim for the bare minimum.

My recommendation would be you aim for the 75% mark.

This is a good pass and is “comfortable”, that is, you can still drop a few marks and pass.

Exam question choice

I recommend the “check, check, query, query” system or “??”

The first step is to read the APMP Exam paper thoroughly and when you see a question that you just know you can do well put a “” against it.

Then skim the Exam Paper a second time and place a “” against your second choice.

Then skim the Exam Paper a third time put a “?” against any question you could attempt if you did not have any other option.

That leaves the remaining questions as “??” which are those you wouldn’t attempt under any circumstances.

Note that the symbol  means a check mark

You will now probably have four to five questions with a “” where you can hope to score about 80% each; two or four with a “” where you can hope to score about 60% and one to four with a “?” where you can hope to score about 45% each.
Potential Exam Scores

Using the above approach, then at best you could have scored:

Five answered questions scoring 80%
Four answered questions scoring 60%
One answered question scoring 45%
An overall score of approximately 68%
Taking the worst situation you may only get:
Four answered questions scoring 80%
Two answered questions scoring 60%
Four answered question scoring 45%
An overall score of approximately 62%
So you don’t have to put in perfect answers for every topic!

As a back stop if you are really struggling, you may have to choose a couple of “??” choices from your exam paper. If so, estimate your likely marks, and go for the question where you think you will score best.

Exam question answering skills

When you consider the time constraint and the number of questions you need to answer, then on average each question will cover between one and a half to two sides of paper, giving a total of around fifteen to twenty sides all together.

Start each answer or part answer on a new page, it makes it easy to mark and keeps you on track.

Don’t just keep on writing – a text dense ten line paragraph is hard for the examiner to read and potential marks may be missed (by the examiner and you!)

Each point you make should start on a new paragraph, so leave a two or three lines gap between each paragraph. This will also stop you from waffling on about a single point, keeps you on track, and makes it easier and clearer for the examiner to mark.

Make sure any diagrams you draw have a title, are clearly labelled and have a key if appropriate (e.g. on a network diagram). If you have drawn a graph, clearly label each axis and state the scale you have used.

Be as neat as you can but don’t waste time.

Use a ruler when appropriate.

Freehand boxes are perfectly acceptable on a network diagram, for example, but keep them neat; using a ruler wastes valuable time.

Use short sentences and simple words.

Avoid all use of jargon and acronyms. If you are tempted to use them then explain what they mean.

Remember the examiner can only mark what you have written, they do not know that you may have meant something else as well. If your statement means more than one thing explain them all.

Avoid using “etc”, if there is something to say, say it.

Use your own experience when answering the questions. For example, there are as many project life-cycle definitions and risk process names as there are industries and organisations.

So you could start your answer to a question such as “State the purpose managing risks, and give an example of the risk management steps” by writing something like: “I work for a chemical processing company and our life cycle has the following phases: inception, definition, delivery, handover, benefits realization”. 

Finally, answer your “” questions first, you will gain confidence and you may discover that in fact, one of your “?” turns out to be a “”.

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