PMP Process — Managing Technical Aspects Practice Question
You are managing a hybrid project where the team uses Scrum for development but follows a traditional approach for reporting. The project is behind schedule because the development team is spending too much time on documentation for status reports. The product owner is concerned about the lack of progress. What should you 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
✓
Work with the stakeholders to simplify the reporting requirements and reduce the documentation burden on the development team
Simplifying reporting reduces administrative burden and allows the development team to focus on their core work, addressing the root cause of the delay. Option A is incorrect because additional meetings would further distract the team. Option B is incorrect because team-building does not solve the process overhead issue. Option C is incorrect because adding more developers does not eliminate the excessive documentation requirement.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Require the team to attend additional status meetings to improve communication
Why it's wrong here
Requiring the team to attend additional status meetings would directly increase the documentation burden by demanding more preparation, attendance, and subsequent follow-up documentation like meeting minutes or action item tracking. This approach misdiagnoses the problem, as the core issue is the volume of required documentation, not a lack of communication channels, and would further detract from the team's capacity for development work.
- ✗
Hold a team-building session to improve the team's efficiency
Why it's wrong here
A team-building session primarily addresses issues related to team cohesion, morale, and interpersonal dynamics, aiming to improve collaboration and psychological safety. While valuable for team health, it would not resolve a systemic problem rooted in excessive external reporting requirements or process overhead. The team's efficiency isn't the core problem; rather, the process itself is consuming too much capacity, which team building cannot fix.
- ✗
Add more developers to the team to share the workload
Why it's wrong here
Adding more developers to a team already struggling with a high documentation burden typically exacerbates the problem rather than alleviating it, a phenomenon often described by Brooks's Law. Increased team size introduces more communication paths and coordination overhead, which in turn generates a greater need for documentation to keep everyone aligned. This approach would likely increase the overall reporting burden and reduce per-person productivity, diverting more resources from actual development.
- ✓
Work with the stakeholders to simplify the reporting requirements and reduce the documentation burden on the development team
Why this is correct
This option directly addresses the root cause of the problem by engaging stakeholders to streamline and simplify reporting requirements. By reducing the documentation burden, the project manager enables the development team to reallocate valuable time and effort from administrative tasks to value-added work, such as coding, testing, and delivering product increments. This approach aligns with agile principles of minimizing non-value-added work and maximizing the delivery of working software, ultimately enhancing project velocity and team focus.
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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.