PK0-005 Project Management Concepts Practice Question
A project manager is assigned to a project with a fixed deadline, a fixed budget, and a scope that cannot be reduced. During planning, the team discovers that meeting all three constraints simultaneously is not feasible with current resources. What is the MOST appropriate action for the project manager to take?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is believing the project manager must solve every constraint conflict alone, when authority to change budget or scope typically rests with the sponsor.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Escalate the conflict to the sponsor and request a decision on prioritization
When scope, time, and cost are all fixed and the combination is infeasible, the project manager must escalate to the sponsor, who has authority over budget and can approve trade-offs or additional resources. Silently cutting quality, adding staff, or ignoring the conflict all fail to resolve the underlying constraint problem.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Reduce quality standards to fit the schedule and budget
Why it's wrong here
Lowering quality to meet schedule and budget violates the expected level of performance and often creates rework, defects, and customer dissatisfaction. Quality is not a free variable to sacrifice; doing so typically increases cost and delay later, and it contradicts the commitment to deliver acceptable deliverables.
- ✓
Escalate the conflict to the sponsor and request a decision on prioritization
Why this is correct
When scope, time, and cost are all fixed and infeasible together, the project manager cannot unilaterally break a constraint. Escalating to the sponsor, who controls budget and can authorize trade-offs, is the appropriate action to obtain a decision on which constraint to adjust or what additional resources to provide.
- ✗
Accept the constraints and proceed with the original plan as written
Why it's wrong here
Proceeding despite known infeasibility sets the project up for failure and hides a material risk from stakeholders. The project manager has a responsibility to surface the conflict rather than ignore it, so continuing unchanged is not a defensible choice.
- ✗
Add team members to the project to increase delivery capacity
Why it's wrong here
Adding people without adjusting the plan can increase coordination overhead and, per Brooks's law, may slow delivery on a compressed schedule. It also increases cost, which conflicts with the fixed budget, so it does not resolve the constraint conflict and may worsen it.
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Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official CompTIA exam blueprint
This PK0-005 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the PK0-005 exam.