PMP People — Leading Projects Practice Question
Your agile team has been experiencing declining velocity over the last three sprints. Retrospectives have not identified a clear cause. Several team members mention feeling fatigued and demotivated. As the project manager, what should you do first?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates choose Option B (escalation) because they mistake a team morale issue for a project performance metric that requires higher-level intervention, or Option A (adding resources) because they default to a traditional resource-constrained mindset, both of which violate the agile principle of self-organizing teams and servant leadership.
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
✓
Schedule individual one-on-one meetings with team members to understand their concerns and identify obstacles
The first step when facing declining velocity and team demotivation is to engage directly with team members through one-on-one meetings to uncover root causes. This aligns with the PMP's servant leadership approach, where understanding individual concerns and removing obstacles is prioritized before any process or resource changes. The retrospective has already failed to identify the cause, so deeper, private conversations are needed to surface issues like burnout, interpersonal conflicts, or unclear requirements.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Add more team members to the project to distribute the workload
Why it's wrong here
Adding more team members to an existing project, especially one experiencing performance issues, often invokes Brooks's Law, increasing communication overhead and coordination complexity without addressing the underlying causes of declining velocity. New members require significant onboarding, diverting existing team members' time and potentially further reducing immediate productivity rather than improving it. This approach fails to identify and resolve systemic impediments.
- ✗
Escalate the velocity drop to the steering committee and ask for guidance
Why it's wrong here
Escalating directly to the steering committee without first investigating the root causes and attempting to resolve them internally is a premature action for a Project Manager in an agile context. A PMP is expected to act as a servant leader, actively identifying and removing impediments for the team. Such an escalation bypasses the PM's primary responsibility to support the team and gather necessary information before seeking higher-level intervention.
- ✓
Schedule individual one-on-one meetings with team members to understand their concerns and identify obstacles
Why this is correct
Scheduling individual one-on-one meetings demonstrates a servant leadership approach, providing a safe space for team members to articulate concerns, identify impediments, and share perspectives that might not emerge in group settings. This direct engagement allows the Project Manager to actively listen, understand the underlying causes of the velocity decline, and then strategically work to remove those obstacles, fostering trust and improving team morale and productivity.
- ✗
Set stricter deadlines and increase velocity targets to motivate the team
Why it's wrong here
Imposing stricter deadlines and arbitrarily increasing velocity targets without addressing underlying issues is a counterproductive and demotivating approach in agile environments. This tactic often leads to increased stress, burnout, reduced quality, and further decreases in morale and actual productivity, as it fails to address the systemic problems causing the velocity decline. It shifts focus from sustainable pace and value delivery to unsustainable pressure.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to the PMP Exam and Project Management Basics
Key term
Training and Development
Training and Development is the process of enhancing team members' skills, knowledge, and competencies to improve project performance and achieve career growth.
Key term
Organizational Change Management
Organizational Change Management (OCM) is the structured approach to preparing, supporting, and guiding people through changes in an organization to ensure lasting success.
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