PMP Practice Question: Business Environment: strategy and project benefits
In an agile project, the team's velocity has dropped across three consecutive sprints. The project manager suspects that technical debt is causing slowdowns. What should the PM do?
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
✓
Facilitate a retrospective to identify impediments and create an action plan
Facilitating a retrospective allows the team to openly discuss the causes of the velocity drop, including technical debt, and collaboratively create an action plan to address it. Option A is incorrect because replacing team members does not address underlying issues. Option C is incorrect because increasing sprint duration may mask the problem without solving it. Option D is incorrect because immediate escalation to the sponsor bypasses the team's problem-solving process.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Replace the underperforming team members
Why it's wrong here
Replacing team members without a thorough understanding of the root cause for a velocity drop is a highly disruptive and premature action in an agile context. Velocity is a team-level metric, reflecting collective output and potential systemic issues, not solely individual underperformance. Such a move undermines team stability, trust, and self-organization, potentially exacerbating the problem and hindering the team's ability to collaboratively identify and resolve impediments.
- ✓
Facilitate a retrospective to identify impediments and create an action plan
Why this is correct
Facilitating a retrospective is the cornerstone agile practice for continuous improvement, providing a dedicated forum for the self-organizing team to inspect its processes and identify the root causes of performance issues, such as a velocity drop. During this event, the team collaboratively identifies impediments (e.g., technical debt, external blockers, process inefficiencies) and creates a concrete action plan to address them. This empowers the team to own their solutions, fostering transparency and accountability, which directly leads to sustainable improvements.
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Increase the sprint duration to give the team more time
Why it's wrong here
Increasing the sprint duration without first understanding the underlying reasons for a velocity drop is a superficial fix that merely postpones addressing the actual problem. This action disrupts the established rhythm and feedback loops inherent in agile sprints, potentially leading to reduced focus, increased work in progress, and delayed identification of critical impediments. It masks the true efficiency issues rather than resolving them, thereby hindering genuine continuous improvement.
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Report the velocity drop to the sponsor immediately
Why it's wrong here
Immediately reporting a velocity drop to the sponsor without prior investigation or a proposed plan demonstrates a lack of proactive problem-solving and leadership from the project manager. While transparency is vital, the PMP's role is to first engage the team to understand the situation, identify potential causes, and collaboratively devise a strategy for resolution. Communication to stakeholders should then include not just the problem, but also the team's plan to address it, showcasing control and a path forward.
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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.