PMP People — Leading Projects Practice Question
You are managing a project where the team has been working overtime for several weeks to meet a milestone. The milestone is achieved, but the team is exhausted. What should you do to sustain the team's performance?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often choose immediate relief (time off or rewards) over root-cause analysis, failing to recognize that the PMP exam prioritizes long-term, systemic solutions that prevent recurrence over short-term fixes.
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
✓
Conduct a retrospective to identify causes of overtime and implement improvements
A retrospective directly addresses the root cause of unsustainable overtime, enabling the project manager to implement process improvements that prevent recurrence. Sustaining team performance requires addressing systemic issues, not just short-term relief. This aligns with the PMI talent triangle's emphasis on leadership and team motivation through continuous improvement.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Conduct a retrospective to identify causes of overtime and implement improvements
Why this is correct
Conducting a retrospective is a crucial practice, especially in adaptive environments, to systematically analyze past performance and identify the underlying causes of issues like excessive overtime. This structured team meeting facilitates open discussion, allowing the team to pinpoint process inefficiencies, scope creep, unrealistic estimates, or other systemic problems that led to the burnout. By collaboratively developing and implementing actionable improvements, the project manager ensures that lessons learned are applied to prevent recurrence, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and sustainable team performance.
- ✗
Reward the team with a bonus and move on to the next phase
Why it's wrong here
While team recognition and rewards are valuable for morale, simply providing a bonus and moving forward fails to address the fundamental reasons behind the overtime. This approach treats the symptom rather than the root cause, leaving the underlying process flaws or planning deficiencies unexamined and uncorrected. Consequently, the project remains vulnerable to similar issues in future phases or projects, potentially leading to repeated team burnout and diminished long-term project success.
- ✗
Encourage the team to take a few days off to recover
Why it's wrong here
Encouraging time off offers temporary relief for an overworked team, which is important for individual well-being, but it does not resolve the systemic issues that caused the overtime in the first place. Without a formal process to investigate and rectify the root causes, such as poor planning, scope creep, or inadequate resource allocation, the team is highly likely to experience similar periods of intense workload and burnout in subsequent project phases. This reactive approach neglects the opportunity for crucial process improvement.
- ✗
Increase the team's resources for the next milestone
Why it's wrong here
Increasing team resources for the next milestone without first understanding the specific causes of the current overtime is a premature and potentially inefficient solution. The overtime might stem from factors other than insufficient personnel, such as unclear requirements, technical debt, or inefficient workflows, which additional resources alone cannot fix. A proper analysis is required to determine if more resources are truly needed, and if so, what type of resources, to ensure effective problem-solving rather than merely adding headcount to an unoptimized process.
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JA
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.