PMP Process — Managing Technical Aspects Practice Question
Your agile team has been experiencing conflicts between two senior developers over technical approaches during sprint planning. The conflicts are causing delays and affecting team morale. As the project manager, what is the BEST course of action?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse the project manager's authority with a directive role, leading them to choose option C (making the decision themselves) or option B (escalating), when the agile mindset requires servant leadership and team empowerment to resolve technical conflicts.
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 meeting between the developers to discuss and resolve the technical disagreement
Facilitating a meeting between the developers is the best course of action because it directly addresses the root cause of the conflict—a technical disagreement—while empowering the team to self-organize and resolve the issue collaboratively. As an agile project manager, your role is to remove impediments and foster a safe environment for constructive debate, not to impose technical decisions or escalate unnecessarily. This approach aligns with the agile principle of building projects around motivated individuals and trusting them to solve technical problems, which preserves team morale and avoids delays caused by unresolved conflicts.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Facilitate a meeting between the developers to discuss and resolve the technical disagreement
Why this is correct
Constructive conflict resolution through facilitated discussion promotes team cohesion and decision-making.
- ✗
Escalate the issue to the functional managers of the developers
Why it's wrong here
Escalation should be a last resort; the PM should first attempt to resolve the conflict within the team.
- ✗
Make the technical decision yourself to end the debate
Why it's wrong here
The PM should empower the team to make technical decisions; imposing a solution can undermine team ownership.
- ✗
Assign the developers to different teams to avoid future conflicts
Why it's wrong here
Removing a senior developer from the team avoids the immediate conflict but fails to address the root cause of technical disagreement, which an agile coach or facilitated negotiation would resolve through shared decision-making. It is tempting because reassignment is a quick structural fix for interpersonal friction, and it would be correct if the conflict stemmed from incompatible skill gaps rather than differing technical opinions on the same sprint backlog.
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Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to the PMP Exam and Project Management Basics
Key term
Scrum Methodology
Scrum is a lightweight process framework that helps teams deliver complex projects in small, iterative chunks called sprints.
Key term
Sprint Planning
Sprint Planning is a time-boxed meeting at the start of a Scrum sprint where the team decides what work they can deliver and how they will do it.
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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.