September 7, 2026 · 8 min read
TL;DR: Options that make a distributed team work identical hours, meet in one time zone, or relocate to a single site appear five times across this bank and are keyed zero times. The keyed answers do something different every time: they design the handoff, plan the communication around the separation, or fix the structure that excludes the remote person. Co-location is keyed only when the distance is genuinely closeable, which is the distinction the harder questions in this slice are built on.
Every candidate knows agile prefers face-to-face communication, and the exam knows they know. So it writes scenarios where face-to-face is impossible and puts an option in the list that pretends otherwise. Requiring everyone to work the same hours looks decisive. It is the reflex answer, and in this bank it has never once been the right one.
Because it does not solve the problem, it relocates it onto the team. Four separate questions in this bank offer some version of that move, and none of them keys it.
The four variants are: mandate that everyone works to a single time zone, require every member to shift hours for a full eight-hour overlap, move to synchronous daily meetings scheduled for whichever zone has the most people, and force identical working hours regardless of time zone. Each one appears in a different question, and each one is a distractor.
Look at what gets keyed instead. A team spread across four time zones has a two-hour window each day when everyone is online, status updates keep arriving too late to act on, and decisions stall overnight. The keyed answer spends the scarce overlap on the decisions that need live back-and-forth, and structures everything else as asynchronous handoffs with written context, a named owner for the next step, and an agreed meaning of done. That is not a softer answer than mandating hours. It is a harder one, because it requires designing something.
A follow-the-sun support project three regions apart has the same shape, and the keyed answer is to develop a communications plan that accommodates the team's separate working hours. Again the distractors include mandating one time zone, and again they include relocating everyone centrally.
When the distance is small enough to close. That distinction is what separates candidates who have memorised "agile likes co-location" from candidates who read the stem.
| What the stem says | Keyed direction | The distractor it beats |
|---|---|---|
| Team split across three offices around one city, already on video calls, velocity dropping | Bring them together to work in one place | Buy better video-conferencing gear |
| Team across five time zones, building the resource management plan | Plan for a virtual team and write the plan on that basis | Relocate everyone, or re-source from one site |
| Team across four time zones with a two-hour daily overlap | Use the overlap for live decisions, structure the rest asynchronously | Require an eight-hour shared working day |
| Members in several countries, information not reaching people reliably | Adopt video conferencing and tools suited to a global virtual team | Review the RACI chart, or ask for weekly written summaries |
| Office closed for three months, team has never worked remotely | Identify the training they need on the remote collaboration tools | Trim scope to absorb the productivity drop |
Two rows of that table look contradictory until you read the stems. Three offices around one city is a separation of an hour's drive, so closing it is a real option and it gets keyed. Five time zones is a fact about the project, so the keyed answer plans around it. The exam is not asking whether you prefer co-location. It is asking whether you noticed how far apart these people are.
Common trap: answering a remote-team question by buying technology. It is keyed in exactly one circumstance, when the technology is missing and information is failing to cross the distance as a result. When the stem says the team already has video calls and collaboration tools and is still struggling, investing in better gear is a distractor, and it is offered precisely because it feels like action. This bank names that distractor and explains what the stem already told you, rather than leaving you to work out afterwards which detail you skipped.
There is a question in this slice worth reading twice. A fully remote member is rarely included when the co-located majority makes quick calls in the hallway or over lunch. Nobody is being unkind. The remote member has not even complained. But their input has started arriving too late to matter.
The options are: ask the remote member to speak up sooner, move every informal decision into a scheduled meeting, log any decision affecting the work in a channel the remote member watches before it is acted on, or assign a co-located colleague to relay hallway conversations daily.
The keyed answer is the logging rule. The reasoning is worth carrying into every question in this slice: the exclusion is structural, not personal, so the fix has to change when the decision becomes visible, not how anyone feels about it. Asking the excluded person to fix their own exclusion puts the burden in the wrong place. Routing everything through a relay adds a human bottleneck. Moving every informal decision into a scheduled meeting kills the speed that made hallway decisions useful in the first place.
The same instinct explains a related keyed answer elsewhere: when a remote team quietly abandoned a chat platform everyone had agreed to two months earlier, the keyed move is to meet them and find out why it did not stick, rather than emailing a reminder that the decision was already made.
Is co-location ever the right answer on the PMP exam? Yes, when the distance is genuinely closeable. Three offices around one city keys to bringing people together. Five time zones keys to planning for a virtual team. The test is whether the separation is something you can actually remove.
Why is requiring everyone to work the same hours always wrong? Because it moves the cost onto people who did not create the problem, and this bank keys against it in every form it appears: single time zone, full eight-hour overlap, identical hours regardless of zone. The keyed answers design the handoff instead.
Do more tools fix a struggling remote team? Only when the tools are missing. If the stem says the team already has video calls and collaboration tools and is still losing velocity, better gear is a distractor.
What do the keyed answers actually do about remote exclusion? They change the structure. The keyed fix for a remote member left out of hallway decisions is a rule that decisions get logged where they can see them before being acted on, not a request that they speak up more.
PMP Practice's 2,141 questions are re-certified against PMBOK 8 and the July 2026 exam content outline, with every wrong answer explained rather than just marked wrong, including the confident ones that cost people marks. Start the free 20-question sample with no card and no signup.
Related: Communications Management Plan and Leading the Project Team: What to Do With the Person Who Is Not Working Out. Study the domain: People.
Sources: PMI, PMP Exam Content Outline (2026) · PMI, PMP Certification
Is co-location ever the right answer on the PMP exam?
Yes, but only when the distance is genuinely closeable. In this bank a team split across three offices around one city, suffering communication delays, keys to bringing members together to work in one place, because they are inside a single metro area. A team spread across five time zones keys the other way: plan for a virtual team and build the resource management plan around that. The test is not whether co-location is good. It is whether the separation is something you can actually remove.
Why is requiring everyone to work the same hours always wrong?
Because it fixes the project's problem by moving the cost onto people who did not create it, and this bank keys against it every time it appears. Mandating a single time zone, requiring an eight-hour overlap, and forcing identical working hours regardless of time zone are all offered as options and none is ever correct. The keyed answers instead design the handoff: use the overlap window for what genuinely needs live discussion and structure everything else asynchronously.
Do more tools fix a struggling remote team?
Sometimes, and the exam is careful about when. When information is genuinely failing to cross distance, adopting video conferencing and tools suited to a global virtual team is keyed. When a team already has video calls and collaboration tools and is still losing velocity, buying better gear is a distractor. Read the stem for whether the technology is missing or already present and not working, because those two scenarios have opposite answers.
What do the keyed answers actually do about remote exclusion?
They change the structure, not the feelings. In one question a remote member is quietly left out of hallway decisions and their input arrives too late to matter. Asking them to speak up sooner and assigning a colleague to relay conversations are both offered. The keyed answer establishes a lightweight rule that any decision affecting the work gets logged in a channel the remote member watches before it is acted on. The exclusion is structural, so the fix has to be structural.