PMP Process — Managing Technical Aspects Practice Question
In an agile project, the team's velocity has dropped for three consecutive sprints. The daily standup meetings are rushed, and team members often work in silos. What should the project manager do first?
⚠ Common exam trap
PMP agile questions often test the reflex to 'fix' the team with more resources or oversight — the correct agile answer is almost always to let the team self-identify issues via a retrospective.
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 propose improvements
In agile, when velocity drops and team dysfunction appears (rushed standups, silos), the correct first action is to facilitate a retrospective so the team can inspect and adapt. The retrospective is the agile ceremony specifically designed to surface impediments and agree on improvements, and it empowers the team rather than imposing top-down fixes.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the frequency of daily standups to twice per day
Why it's wrong here
Increasing the frequency of daily standups from once to twice per day is an ineffective response to a velocity drop. Daily standups are primarily for coordination and sharing progress, not for deep problem-solving or impediment removal. Doubling their frequency would consume valuable development time, potentially leading to meeting fatigue and reduced focus on actual work, thereby exacerbating the very problem it intends to solve rather than addressing root causes.
- ✗
Add more team members to increase capacity
Why it's wrong here
Adding more team members to an existing project experiencing a velocity drop often invokes Brooks's Law, stating that 'adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.' New team members require significant onboarding, training, and increased communication overhead, which initially reduces the productivity of existing team members. This approach fails to address underlying systemic issues like process inefficiencies, technical debt, or external blockers, making it counterproductive in the short term and potentially in the long term.
- ✗
Assign a senior developer to monitor individual productivity
Why it's wrong here
Assigning a senior developer to monitor individual productivity is a command-and-control approach that directly contradicts agile principles of self-organizing teams and psychological safety. This micromanagement tactic undermines team trust, fosters an environment of fear rather than collaboration, and shifts focus from collective value delivery to individual metrics. It fails to identify or resolve systemic impediments affecting the entire team's velocity, instead potentially lowering morale and further decreasing overall team performance.
- ✓
Facilitate a retrospective to identify impediments and propose improvements
Why this is correct
Facilitating a retrospective is the most appropriate agile response to a drop in team velocity, as it is the dedicated event for continuous improvement. During a retrospective, the entire team collaboratively inspects the past sprint, identifies root causes of impediments, and proposes actionable improvements to processes, tools, or team dynamics. This empowers the self-organizing team to collectively diagnose and resolve its own challenges, fostering learning and directly addressing the factors contributing to the velocity decrease.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official PMI exam blueprint
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.