PMI-ACP Flashcards — Free PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), 2024-revamped exam outline (PMI-ACP) Study Cards

Conduct a backlog grooming session with stakeholders to reprioritize based on business value.

When stakeholders report that delivered features don't match current organizational priorities, the root cause is almost always a stale or misaligned product backlog. The Product Owner owns backlog ordering, so the correct first move is to convene stakeholders and the PO to re-evaluate and reprioritize backlog items by business value. This restores alignment before any delivery work continues.

Define the objective and let the team decide how to achieve it.

Self-organization means the team decides how to accomplish its work. A leader best promotes it by clearly defining the objective (the 'what' and 'why') and then delegating the 'how' to the team, giving them autonomy, mastery, and purpose. This shifts the leader's role from directing tasks to removing impediments and coaching.

Use historical velocity to guide future capacity planning.

The most Agile-aligned response to over-commitment is to use empirical data—specifically historical velocity—to forecast capacity and adjust the amount of work pulled into the sprint. Velocity provides a reliable, team-driven baseline for how much backlog can be completed in a sprint, enabling more accurate commitment. This supports the Agile principles of empirical process control and continuous improvement.

Collaborate with stakeholders to revise the product vision.

The product vision is owned by the Product Owner but shaped with stakeholders, so when market shifts invalidate it, the Product Owner should collaborate with stakeholders to revise it. This keeps the vision aligned with business value and customer needs while preserving stakeholder buy-in. The Product Owner remains accountable for the vision, but revising it is a collaborative, not unilateral, act.

Decompose epics into smaller, investable user stories.

When features are too large to deliver value, the recommended agile strategy is to decompose epics into smaller, investable user stories that can be completed and delivered incrementally. Smaller stories enable faster feedback, reduce risk, and allow the team to deliver value continuously rather than in large, infrequent batches.

Stop starting new work and assist the testers or address the block with the third party.

When a WIP limit is reached and items are blocked, the agile response is to stop starting new work and swarm on the blockage — either helping testers or resolving the third-party dependency. This respects the WIP limit, exposes the impediment, and improves flow rather than hiding the problem.

Encourage the team to swarm on blockers and share the responsibility for the Sprint Goal.

To break down silos and encourage shared responsibility, the best approach is to have the team swarm on blockers and collectively own the Sprint Goal. Swarming means multiple team members collaborate on a single item to finish it faster, which promotes knowledge sharing and reduces handoffs. This directly fosters a cross-functional, shared-responsibility mindset.

Facilitate a discussion on how to make it more valuable for them.

When a team finds the daily stand-up wasteful, the servant leader should facilitate a conversation about its purpose and format rather than impose or abandon it. The stand-up exists to enable daily inspection and adaptation, so the team should own how it is run. Facilitating a discussion (C) respects self-organization and lets the team redesign the ceremony to deliver value.

Conducting user interviews or focus groups.

Conducting user interviews or focus groups is a direct, interactive elicitation technique that draws requirements straight from stakeholders through structured conversation, allowing the analyst to probe, clarify, and uncover latent needs. PMI-ACP and the Agile Manifesto emphasize 'individuals and interactions over processes and tools,' so face-to-face techniques like interviews and focus groups align with agile values. These methods produce rich, high-quality information that can be validated immediately with the stakeholder.

Use techniques like 'Silent Brainstorming' (e.g., 1-2-4-All) to gather diverse perspectives.

Groupthink occurs when the desire for harmony suppresses dissenting views. Silent Brainstorming techniques like 1-2-4-All gather input independently before discussion, which prevents dominant voices from anchoring the group and surfaces diverse perspectives. Option B directly addresses the root cause of groupthink.

Encourage the team member to assist others with their tasks.

In Agile, the team's goal is to optimize flow and deliver value collectively, not to maximize individual utilization. When one member finishes early, the most Agile-aligned response is to have them swarm on other tasks or pair with struggling teammates, which balances WIP and reduces bottlenecks. This supports the self-organizing, cross-functional team principle and avoids creating a new bottleneck by overloading one person.

Encourage the Product Owner to split the large backlog items into smaller, INVEST-compliant user stories.

When sprint backlog items are significantly larger than the team's historical velocity can absorb, the root problem is item size, not team capability. The Scrum Master should facilitate splitting oversized items into smaller, INVEST-compliant user stories so the team can deliver incrementally within the sprint and maintain a sustainable pace. This preserves flow and predictability.

Facilitate a blame-free post-mortem focused on process gaps.

Facilitating a blame-free post-mortem focused on process gaps transitions the team to an agile mindset by emphasizing systemic improvement over individual fault. This aligns with agile values of respect, courage, and continuous learning.

Discuss how to maintain a more sustainable pace in the next retrospective.

Sprint fatigue signals an unsustainable pace, and the Agile response is to address it through the team's own inspect-and-adapt mechanism. Discussing a more sustainable pace in the next retrospective (C) lets the team identify the causes — overcommitment, technical debt, lack of slack — and adjust. This aligns with the Agile principle that teams should work at a sustainable pace indefinitely.

Group related user stories under larger epics.

Grouping related user stories under larger epics improves backlog visibility by creating a hierarchical structure that reduces clutter while preserving detail at the story level. This is a standard backlog refinement technique that helps the Product Owner and team navigate large backlogs. It maintains traceability from high-level themes to granular work items.

Decompose the story into smaller, independently deliverable user stories.

Decomposing the story into smaller, independently deliverable user stories is correct because it allows the team to complete valuable increments within the sprint, maintains flow, and adheres to the INVEST criteria (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable). This approach enables continuous delivery and reduces batch size, which is a core Agile principle.

Assess current practices against Agile principles.

When a team is doing 'Agile in name only' (Water-Scrum-Fall), the first step is to assess current practices against Agile principles to identify gaps and understand the root causes. This diagnostic approach respects the team's context and avoids imposing changes without understanding the current state.

Allocate a percentage of each sprint's capacity to address technical debt.

Allocating a percentage of each sprint's capacity to technical debt (D) is the balanced agile approach: it continuously reduces debt while still delivering new features. This prevents the debt from compounding and slowing delivery further.

Help them refine their stories to be smaller and clearer.

The core issue is that stories are too large or ambiguous, which prevents the team from completing them within a sprint. By helping the team refine stories to be smaller and clearer, you address the root cause: large stories increase uncertainty, make estimation harder, and often lead to carryover. This aligns with Agile principles of incremental delivery and continuous improvement, enabling the team to finish work and gain a sense of accomplishment, which reinforces the Agile mindset.

Implement a formal dependency board to visualize blockers and upstream/downstream impacts.

A dependency board makes external blockers and their upstream/downstream impacts visible to the whole team, which is the core mechanism for optimizing end-to-end flow in Kanban/agile practice. Visualizing dependencies lets the team swarm on blockers, re-sequence work, and escalate early rather than discovering delays at sprint review. This directly addresses the root cause (unmanaged external dependencies) without changing the team's cadence.