You are presented with a number of proposals for “innovation” projects and you need to decide how to spend your limited budget. Each proposal describes the projected benefits and costs, and a list of possible risks. Your organization has little experience in either the business domain or the technology, proposed for any of the projects, and you are skeptical of the claimed benefits and costs. What can you do to move ahead?
(choose the best answer)
A. Fund the proposal with the best cost/benefit trade-off.
B. Do not fund any of the proposals, stick to what you know.
C. Fund each proposal sufficiently to test the market need and re-evaluate.
D. Fund the proposal with the least risk.

True or False: Running multiple experiments on the same product at the same time helps to reduce the cost and complexity of testing new ideas.
A. True
B. False

An organization’s portfolio investment process consists of the following activities performed once a year: ideas for projects are collected along with their projected benefits, development managers produce rough estimates, benefit/cost ratios are determined, and budget is allocated based on expected cost/benefit ratios.
What can you say about this process?
(choose the best answer)
A. Cost estimates are not accurate because the scope is not well-understood.
B. It is likely to miss opportunities that arise during the year.
C. If claimed benefits are overstated, investment decisions could be poor.
D. Managers are not best positioned to estimate technical work.
E. All of the above.

How does running experiments help organizations perform better?
(choose the best answer)
A. It helps them determine whether the goal is achievable.
B. It helps them to validate assumptions.
C. It helps them to test the value of features.
D. It helps them to test the effectiveness of improvements.
E. All of the above.

Which of the following statements is true:
(choose the best answer)
A. Projects succeed when they spend additional time defining and reviewing requirements.
B. Delivering a solution and gathering feedback provides important information to plan the next step.
C. Empirical approaches work for simple problems, but cannot scale to large, complex problems.
D. Projects succeed when they spend additional time identifying and mitigating risk.

The Evidence-Based Management framework helps you to:
(choose the best answer)
A. Understand whether your teams are efficient.
B. Better track your progress against plans.
C. Improve the predictability of a team’s performance.
D. Improve your organization’s ability to deliver value.