PMP People — Leading Projects Practice Question
Your agile team has been working together for three months, and you notice that sprint velocity has been steadily declining. During the retrospective, team members mention they feel overworked and unclear about priorities. What is the BEST action to take?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates choose a process-focused answer like adding a daily stand-up (Option D) or a capacity-focused answer like adding team members (Option B), mistakenly believing these will improve tracking or throughput, when the real issue is a lack of clarity and unsustainable workload that must be resolved through collaboration with the product owner.
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 discussion with the product owner and team to reprioritize the backlog and reduce workload
It directly addresses the root causes of declining velocity: unclear priorities and overwork. By facilitating a discussion between the team and the product owner, you enable collaborative backlog reprioritization and workload adjustment, which aligns with the agile principle of sustainable pace and the servant leadership role of the project manager. This action empowers the team to focus on the highest-value work while reducing burnout, which is the most effective way to restore velocity.
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 discussion with the product owner and team to reprioritize the backlog and reduce workload
Why this is correct
This is the most appropriate agile response because it directly addresses the root causes of an overworked team: an unmanageable backlog and potentially unclear priorities. By facilitating a discussion between the team and the Product Owner, the Scrum Master enables collaborative decision-making to reprioritize work, remove lower-value items, and align the workload with the team's sustainable capacity. This approach fosters transparency, promotes team ownership, and adheres to agile principles of sustainable pace and continuous improvement.
- ✗
Add more team members to the next sprint to increase capacity
Why it's wrong here
Adding more team members to an existing, potentially struggling, agile team is generally counterproductive in the short term, a concept often referred to as Brooks's Law. New members require significant onboarding time, diverting existing team members' attention for training and integration, which temporarily reduces overall team velocity. Furthermore, it increases communication overhead and complexity, failing to address the underlying issues of an unmanageable workload or poor prioritization that might be causing the team's current difficulties.
- ✗
Ask the team to work overtime for the next two sprints to catch up
Why it's wrong here
Asking the team to work overtime is a short-sighted and unsustainable solution that directly contradicts agile principles of sustainable pace. While it might offer a temporary boost, prolonged overtime inevitably leads to decreased morale, increased stress, higher rates of errors, and eventual burnout, significantly impacting quality and long-term productivity. This approach exacerbates the problem by creating technical debt and further reducing the team's capacity in subsequent sprints.
- ✗
Implement a daily stand-up meeting to track progress more closely
Why it's wrong here
While daily stand-up meetings are a fundamental agile practice for synchronization and identifying impediments, merely implementing one or tracking progress more closely does not resolve the root cause of an overloaded team. A stand-up provides visibility into what the team is doing and any blockers, but it does not inherently reduce the volume of work or help the team and Product Owner prioritize effectively. The problem here is workload and prioritization, not a lack of progress tracking.
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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.