PMI ACP - Delivery Domain

A team realizes that lead times are unpredictable and would like to make improvements to enable more accurate forecasting. The team believes that varying story sizes are the primary reason for this unpredictability.

What should the agile practitioner do?

• Suggest meeting with the product owner to break backlog items down into smaller and similar sizes

• Limit work-in-progress to avoid multitasking and adjust the team’s capacity estimates

• Determine which stories are the largest and most unpredictable and reprioritize them

• Inform management that lead time estimates can be unpredictable and are not definitive commitments

Answer explanation

Solution: A. Break down all backlog items into smaller and similar sizes.

Smaller and similarly sized backlog items are easier to estimate and manage, increasing predictability and improving forecasting accuracy. Smaller stories allow for more reliable forecasting of lead times since small items flow through any system faster, with less variability and reduced risk. This concept is used in Kanban approaches, to maintain a smooth and steady flow of work through the system. When tasks are of similar size, they are more likely to move through the workflow at a consistent pace, avoiding bottlenecks that can occur when larger tasks take longer to complete than smaller ones.

While limiting work-in-progress and avoiding multitasking are good recommended practices, this answer does not relate to the context of the scenario. The scenario specifically reflects varying story sizes, forcasting issues, and unpredictable lead times.

Determining what stories will be large and unpredictable is not the best option in this case. While it does not seem like a bad idea to find out which stories are large, the issue is that stories are of differing sizes, so this answer does not closely relate to the issue at hand. Identifying larger and unpredictable stories does nothing to address them.

Informing management that estimates can be unpredictable and are not commitments is not the right answer, as it simply informs management and does not address the issue of varying story sizes.

An agile practitioner is planning a new project's initial scope, schedule, and cost-range estimates. The team will use a visual board to control work and will measure performance using cycle time.

What additional metrics should the team use to control work?

• Due date performance and lead time

• Task board and time estimates

• Defect classes and work-item types

• Scatter plots and burndown charts

Answer explanation

Solution: A. Due date performance and lead time.

Due date performance helps ensure that the team meets deadlines and delivers value within the expected time frames. Lead time, which measures the total time it takes for a task to travel from the beginning of the workflow to its completion, provides insight into the efficiency of the processes and highlights any bottlenecks.

Task boards and time estimates are useful for visualizing tasks and planning, but they do not provide quantitative data on the team’s performance.

Defect classes and work-item types are more focused on categorizing issues and types of work rather than controlling work progress.

Scatter plots are typically used to identify patterns or trends over time, and burndown charts focus on progress completion rather than lead time and due date performance.

During a sprint retrospective, the product owner informs the project team that the solution is not meeting business expectations. What should the agile practitioner do to ensure that expectations are met on future releases?

• Establish quarterly customer review meetings.

• Include the product owner in the daily coordination meetings.

• Review the success criteria for previous releases.

• Schedule more frequent meetings with the product owner.

Answer explanation

Solution: B. Include the product owner in the daily coordination meetings.

Including the product owner in the daily coordination meetings ensures continuous and direct communication between the development team and the product owner. This facilitates prompt feedback, enables the product owner to voice concerns or changes in business expectations, and helps ensure that the team's efforts are aligned with the product vision.

Establishing quarterly customer reviews, although beneficial, might not provide the immediate and continuous feedback necessary to address issues that arise daily or between those quarterly meetings.

Revisiting the success criteria for the previous release might help align future work with business goals, but it does not address the immediate issue, which is addressing the feedback received during the retrospective and ensuring that expectations are met on future releases.

Simply scheduling more frequent meetings with the product owner might not be enough and could cause delays, challenges, and inefficiencies if it is not integrated into the sprint's regular workflow.

A team’s morale is low because an issue that delayed a previous release has resurfaced during the current release. The team has already identified a corrective action for this issue during a retrospective.

What should the agile practitioner and the team do?

• Create an action plan for issues identified during the retrospective.

• Wait until the next retrospective to discuss the issue in depth.

• 1. Gain visibility by escalating the issue to the executive team.

• Develop a lessons learned list to discuss during the next retrospective.

Answer explanation

Solution: A. Create an action plan for issues identified during the retrospective.

Creating an action plan is a key step in addressing and resolving issues. Creating an action plan ensures that the team has a clear and structured plan to follow, which can help improve processes and prevent similar issues from occurring in the future.

Waiting until the next retrospective and/or developing a lessons learned list does not immediately address the situation or proactively manage the issue and the impact of potential delays. These actions may also lead to further delays.

Escalating the issue does not align with the self-directed team approach of agile frameworks.

At the daily coordination meeting, a team member mentions that the development environment has changed. The change may impact velocity and the agreed delivery date.

What should the agile practitioner do?

• Log the threat in the risk log and note it as a potential spike.

• Log the threat in the product backlog and note it as a potential spike.

• Discuss the impact of the threat with the product owner.

• Discuss the impact of the threat with the team members and stakeholders.

Answer explanation

Solution: D. Discuss the impact of the threat with the team members and stakeholders.

Discussing the impact of the threat with team members and stakeholders attempts to quantify and prioritize the risk level of the threat and resolve it clearly and transparently with the team and key stakeholders.

Logging the threat in the risk log and noting it as a potential spike, and logging the threat in the product backlog and noting it as a potential spike, are incorrect options because they just record the possible risk and do not solve the issue of delay.

Discussing the impact of the threat with the product owner is incorrect because it does not include the team and key stakeholders in the discussion and bypasses the agile concept of team collaboration in conflict resolution.

A project is nearing completion when the team identifies product quality issues. What should the agile practitioner and the team have done to avoid this?

• Engaged stakeholders in frequent product quality reviews.

• Defined criteria for quality assurance (QA) during retrospectives.

• Increased the number of quality testers during the previous iteration.

• Documented all product quality issues in the risk register.

Answer explanation

Solution: A. Engaged stakeholders in frequent product quality reviews.

Involving stakeholders in frequent quality reviews is crucial to align expectations and ensure the final product meets requirements. This can be achieved through transparent and continuous communication, inviting them to review meetings, jointly defining quality criteria, using collaboration tools, collecting continuous feedback, offering training, and recognizing their contributions. These strategies facilitate active participation and ensure the quality process is effective and aligned with project goals.

The agile practitioner and team should not wait until retrospectives to define quality criteria. It is essential to establish these criteria at the project’s outset and review them periodically throughout development. This ensures all team members and stakeholders have a clear, shared understanding of quality expectations from the start, facilitating early issue detection and continuous product improvement.

In the agile context, ensuring quality and preventing issues goes beyond simply increasing the number of testers. While testers play a crucial role in defect detection, true quality is achieved through collaborative practices that include early integration of diverse perspectives and continuous code review to foster shared learning. It is also essential to actively involve stakeholders in the process. Adopting an agile culture involves valuing quality as a shared goal, promoting continuous delivery, and facilitating rapid adaptation to changes, all through close and ongoing collaboration with all relevant stakeholders.

Documenting quality issues in the risk register does not directly prevent these problems, but it’s crucial for proactive risk management in agile development. It allows for early identification, root-cause analysis, and learning from past experiences to improve processes continuously. Moreover, it promotes transparency by communicating challenges and actions and facilitating alignment among teams and stakeholders.

An agile practitioner discovers critical impediments that could impact a product's release date. What should the agile practitioner do?

• Share the impediments with the project team to obtain a resolution.

• Eliminate all previous impediments before moving on to the new impediments.

• Immediately assign an owner and determine a date for resolution.

• Create a probability and impact matrix that includes each impediment.

Answer explanation

Solution: A. Share the impediments with the project team to obtain a resolution.

Sharing identified impediments with the team is essential to fostering transparency and collaboration. This practice not only helps everyone better understand the challenges they face but also allows them to leverage the diversity of experiences and perspectives within the team to find more innovative and effective solutions. Moreover, it promotes an environment where all members feel responsible for continuously improving their work and achieving goals more efficiently and effectively. Agile emphasizes adaptability and the capacity to swiftly respond to changes, which involves managing impediments in an iterative and ongoing manner. Prioritizing and resolving impediments based on their significance and urgency allows teams to maintain an efficient workflow centered on delivering value. Agile advocates for a flexible and adaptive approach to addressing impediments, thereby continually enhancing both the process and the team’s overall effectiveness.

We should not assign a specific person as the owner for the impediment or set a premature deadline. The team takes collective responsibility, enhancing cohesion and fostering collaboration. By analyzing and addressing impediments as a team, a shared understanding of challenges is promoted, leveraging diverse perspectives and skills. This practice not only distributes the workload more equitably but also facilitates more robust and sustainable solutions aligned with the team’s goals and values.

In the given context, the probability and impact matrix has likely already been established. It is crucial to communicate new impediments to the team as soon as they are identified and revisit the matrix.

During a project’s first iteration, the newly formed team encounters major process issues that are significantly impacting progress. A team member suggests holding a retrospective to address these issues.

What should the agile practitioner do?

• Explain that retrospective meetings can only be held at the end of an iteration

• Pause the iteration and hold the retrospective to address the process issues

• Explain that the team is experiencing the storming stage and ask them to continue

• Petition for external assistance to help the team address the process issues

Answer explanation

Solution: B. Pause the iteration midway and hold the retrospective to address the process issues

Holding a retrospective allows the team to address and resolve major process issues immediately, improving team collaboration and effectiveness. The issues are significantly impacting the iteration and must be addressed immediately. This is especially important at the start of a project, as early issues can have lasting impacts. The decision to pause the iteration should be made based on the severity of the issues, which, in this scenario, the impact is significant. Once the iteration is paused, a retrospective should be held immediately to assess and address the process issues, followed by replanning the iteration. Early intervention helps prevent issues from escalating and sets a solid foundation for future iterations.

Explaining when a retrospective can be held does not take into account the adaptiveness of agile approaches, and it does not deal with the issues at hand.

Encouraging the team to work through the storm stage does not apply because the problem is a process issue rather than a personality clash.

Seeking external assistance does not align with the self-governing and self-directed approach of agile principles.

A team member on a new project previously provided support to another application. Due to some issues with the application, their former supervisor continues assigning tasks related to that project.

What should the agile practitioner of the new project do?

• Add the issue to the threats and risks lists and ensure it is communicated and escalated.

• Allow the team member to multitask to complete both the work committed to the current project and the previous application.

• 1. Assign more stories to the sprints to ensure that the team member remains in place and is not available for the previous project.

• Assign fewer stories to the sprints so that the team member can still meet all the sprint goals.

Answer explanation

Solution: A. Add the issue to the threats and risks lists, and ensure it is communicated and escalated.

Adding the issue to the lists, communicating the situation, and escalating the issue prioritizes the issue for discussion with the team for appropriate action. Documenting the issue in the threats and risks lists ensures that they are formally recognized and tracked. This helps in monitoring the impact of the situation.

Escalating the issue to higher management if necessary to seek a resolution. It is important to ensure that the issue is communicated to relevant stakeholders, including the former supervisor and the current project team.

Agile practices emphasize the importance of team members focusing on the current project to deliver high-quality work and meet sprint goals. Allowing the team member to multitask may have negative impacts on the new project and should be documented, communicated, and analyzed before making this decision.

Adding more stories to the sprints to make the team member unavailable for their previous project does not address the root cause of the issue and can disrupt the balance and effectiveness of the entire team.

Reducing the number of stories in the sprints to accommodate the team member’s divided attention may lead to underutilization of the team’s capacity and reduce overall progress on the project.

A company's CEO and CFO received contradictory information regarding a project's status. What should the agile practitioner do to resolve this?

• Ensure that the status is up to date and available.

• Add a recurring stakeholder status meeting.

• Email both parties a copy of the project burndown chart.

• Include a task to generate a weekly executive summary.

Answer explanation

Solution: A. Ensure that the status is up to date and available.

Maintaining an up-to-date project status that is readily accessible to all stakeholders, including the CEO and CFO, ensures that everyone receives consistent and accurate information. This approach directly addresses the root cause of the contradictory information by providing a single source of truth for the project’s status.

Adding a recurring stakeholder adds overhead without guaranteeing the immediacy and accuracy of information.

A project burndown chart can provide some status insight, but it does not address the systemic issue of keeping information consistently up-to-date.

Generating a weekly executive summary can help keep executives informed regularly, but this method lacks the real-time update capability needed to ensure continuous alignment.