PMP People — Leading Projects Practice Question
Your Agile team's velocity has dropped for the third consecutive sprint. The team cites increasing technical debt and unclear requirements. As a servant leader, what is the BEST course of action?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse servant leadership with directive actions (like reducing scope or adding meetings) rather than recognizing that the correct response is to facilitate the team's own problem-solving through a retrospective.
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 retrospective to identify root causes and collaboratively develop an improvement plan
As a servant leader, the best course is to facilitate a retrospective to collaboratively identify root causes of the velocity drop, such as technical debt and unclear requirements, and then develop an improvement plan. This aligns with the Agile principle of continuous improvement and empowers the team to address issues at their source rather than applying top-down fixes.
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 retrospective to identify root causes and collaboratively develop an improvement plan
Why this is correct
Facilitating a retrospective is the most appropriate agile response to a sustained velocity drop. This dedicated event allows the entire team to collaboratively inspect their processes, tools, and interactions to identify the underlying root causes, rather than just addressing symptoms. By fostering an environment of psychological safety, the team can then collectively devise and commit to specific, actionable improvement experiments for future iterations, embodying the "inspect and adapt" principle of agile.
- ✗
Reduce the scope of the project to match the current velocity
Why it's wrong here
Reducing project scope reactively to match a declining velocity is an inappropriate response as it bypasses the critical process of understanding *why* velocity has dropped. This approach avoids addressing systemic issues within the team's workflow or environment, potentially leading to further inefficiencies and dissatisfaction. Furthermore, scope changes typically require stakeholder consultation and formal change control, rather than being a unilateral decision based solely on a performance metric.
- ✗
Ask the team to increase their velocity by working overtime
Why it's wrong here
Asking the team to increase velocity by working overtime is a detrimental and unsustainable approach. While it might offer a temporary boost, it inevitably leads to burnout, decreased quality, increased technical debt, and reduced long-term productivity and morale. This tactic fails to address the actual root causes of the velocity drop, instead masking them with unsustainable effort, which is contrary to the principles of sustainable pace in agile.
- ✗
Schedule additional daily standups to increase communication
Why it's wrong here
Scheduling additional daily standups is unlikely to resolve a velocity drop and could be counterproductive. Daily standups serve a specific purpose for quick synchronization and impediment identification; increasing their frequency without understanding *why* communication is currently insufficient or what specific information is missing simply adds overhead. The team needs to address the underlying issues impacting their ability to deliver value, not merely increase meeting time, which diverts focus from actual work.
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