PMP People — Leading Projects Practice Question
Your agile team has a high turnover rate. New members are joining frequently, and the team's performance is declining. What should you do as a servant leader?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to choose Option C (conduct a retrospective) because it sounds like a standard agile practice, but they fail to recognize that the immediate need is to stabilize the team's performance through onboarding, not just to investigate the turnover cause, which is a separate, longer-term activity.
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
✓
Implement a structured onboarding process and assign mentors to new members
As a servant leader on an agile team, your primary responsibility is to remove impediments and foster an environment where the team can thrive. A structured onboarding process with assigned mentors directly addresses the performance decline by accelerating the integration of new members, ensuring they understand team norms, tools, and processes, which stabilizes velocity and reduces disruption.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Implement a structured onboarding process and assign mentors to new members
Why this is correct
Implementing a structured onboarding process provides new team members with the necessary context, tools, and understanding of team norms and processes, accelerating their integration. Assigning mentors offers personalized guidance, facilitates tacit knowledge transfer, and fosters a sense of belonging, directly addressing high turnover by making new members feel supported, productive, and valued quickly within the agile team. This proactive approach enhances team stability and reduces the time to full contribution, aligning with agile principles of self-organization and continuous improvement.
- ✗
Ask HR to hire more experienced contractors to stabilize the team
Why it's wrong here
Asking HR to hire more experienced contractors, while seemingly a quick fix for capacity, does not address the underlying issues causing high turnover or poor integration. Introducing more people, especially external contractors, without a robust integration strategy can increase communication overhead, dilute team cohesion, and potentially worsen the situation by adding more individuals who may also struggle to integrate effectively. This approach fails to build sustainable team capability and may lead to further instability if the root causes of turnover are not resolved.
- ✗
Conduct a retrospective to identify why people are leaving
Why it's wrong here
Conducting a retrospective to identify why people are leaving is a valuable agile practice for continuous improvement and understanding systemic issues. However, in a situation with high turnover and new members joining, the immediate priority is to stabilize the current team and ensure new members can become productive quickly. While understanding the root causes of departure is crucial for long-term retention strategies, it does not directly provide the immediate support and integration mechanisms needed for the current influx of new team members to contribute effectively and feel established.
- ✗
Reduce the team's workload until the new members are up to speed
Why it's wrong here
Reducing the team's workload might temporarily alleviate pressure, but it is a passive measure that does not actively facilitate the integration or skill development of new members. This approach delays project progress without providing the structured support, direct guidance, or opportunities for new team members to actively learn and become proficient within the team's workflow and culture. It fails to address the core problem of enabling new members to contribute effectively and become fully integrated, potentially prolonging their ramp-up time.
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