1. What are reasons that organizations break initiatives into smaller projects? E.g. why not just run "one big project"?

2. Poor estimating at the beginning of the project and lower-than-expected team productivity has resulted in an estimated 15% budget shortfall. What should you do to bring the project back on track? What options will you give your project sponsor?

3. While program management implements project management principles, how is program management different from project management? Use the program management model (PMI-ITIL-COBIT Diagram) as a guideline to your analysis.

4. The ITIL framework involves five areas: Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operations, and Continuous Service improvement. When managing business-critical IT services, how do formal Service Transition processes support stable IT Operations?

5. The ITIL Service Catalogue and Service Desk processes define available services and processes to access to these services. Describe how the Service Desk, Incident Management, and Change Management processes support Service Delivery and a controlled IT Operations environment (Asset Management).

6. ITIL's 7-Step Improvement Model and Demming's Plan/Do/Check/Act cycle are components of continuous improvement. Neither of these define the scope of what should be improved. Describe COBIT's Control Objectives and how these objectives can be used to set performance metrics for a project or program.

7. The COBIT Maturity Model describes an organization's processes from the perspective of repeatability and strategic importance to the organization (COBIT Maturity Model Summary attached). What benefits would an organization expect from investing its time and effort to reach Level-3 maturity for its IT Operations? Why go beyond Level 3?

8. Describe how you would prepare to negotiate the purchase of a new vehicle (assume you are not in a rush to buy the vehicle and that there is a different vehicle you could purchase if you are unable to negotiate an acceptable price). Use the negotiation framework.

9. Describe the differences between a leader/director and a manager. (e.g. one of our final discussions on Day 6). Site the various roles in the program management framework (project manager, line of business manager, and the steering committee).

10. Describe how participating in Mint719 how it may affect your approach to working within an organization, either as a "subject matter expert" or "manager/project manager".

OR

As a member of a steering committee responsible for a program with a defined annual budget of $10M, describe how your committee will initiate and monitor activities involving continuous IT operations, initiatives for change/improvement, and projects that support these initiatives.