PMP People — Leading Projects Practice Question
As a project manager in an agile environment, you need to empower the development team to self-organize. Which THREE practices support this goal? (Choose three)
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse 'empowering the team' with 'maintaining control' or 'assigning tasks for efficiency,' but the PMP exam tests the agile principle that self-organization requires trust and removing impediments, not direct management of tasks or technical decisions.
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
✓
Provide the team with clear goals and boundaries, then trust them to deliver
Empowering a self-organizing team in agile requires providing clear goals and boundaries (e.g., sprint goals and Definition of Done) and then trusting the team to determine the best way to achieve them. This aligns with the Agile Manifesto's principle of 'build projects around motivated individuals' and the Scrum Guide's emphasis on self-management, where the team decides how to accomplish its work within the sprint.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Make all final decisions on technical approaches to maintain control
Why it's wrong here
In an agile environment, the project manager acts as a servant leader, fostering self-organizing teams. Making all final technical decisions centralizes control, directly contradicting the agile principle that the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. This approach disempowers the team, stifles innovation, and reduces their ownership and accountability for the solutions they develop.
- ✗
Assign specific tasks to each team member to ensure efficiency
Why it's wrong here
Agile methodologies emphasize self-organizing teams, where members collaboratively decide how to best accomplish the work. Assigning specific tasks to individual team members is a traditional, top-down management style that diminishes team autonomy and collective ownership. This approach can hinder cross-functional collaboration and prevent the team from leveraging its collective intelligence to optimize workflow and achieve sprint goals efficiently and effectively.
- ✓
Provide the team with clear goals and boundaries, then trust them to deliver
Why this is correct
A core responsibility of an agile project manager, or Scrum Master, is to establish a clear vision and well-defined sprint goals, along with necessary operational boundaries. This provides the team with the "what" and "why," enabling them to self-organize and determine the "how." Trusting the team to deliver within these parameters fosters autonomy, increases motivation, and leverages their collective expertise, aligning with servant leadership principles.
- ✓
Allow the team to decide how to accomplish the sprint goals
Why this is correct
Empowering the team to decide "how" to accomplish sprint goals is fundamental to agile's principle of self-organization. This autonomy allows the team to leverage its collective intelligence, creativity, and diverse skill sets to devise the most effective and efficient technical approaches. By fostering this environment, the project manager enables greater team ownership, commitment, and adaptability, ultimately leading to higher quality deliverables.
- ✓
Remove obstacles that impede the team's progress
Why this is correct
In an agile context, the project manager acts as a servant leader, primarily focused on enabling the team's productivity. Actively identifying and removing obstacles, impediments, or blockers that hinder the team's progress is crucial. This proactive support ensures a smooth workflow, protects the team from external distractions, and allows them to maintain focus on delivering value, thereby maximizing their efficiency and effectiveness.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PMP practice question is part of Courseiva's free PMI 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 PMP exam.