PMP Agile – 60 Questions

An agile team at a government agency has been delivering a case-management system for nine sprints. The team performs well within sprints, but cross-sprint activities like environment provisioning and security reviews are handled by other departments that work on different timelines. These handoffs create delays at the start of every sprint while the team waits for environments and approvals that were requested weeks earlier. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at an aerospace supplier has been delivering a parts-tracking system for eight sprints. The team tracks velocity, cycle time, and defect rate. All three metrics are healthy. The sponsor asks the project manager whether the system is reducing the parts-search time that justified the project’s funding. No one has measured parts-search time since the project began, and the team does not know whether their work is achieving the business objective. What should the project manager do?

An agile team is developing a telemedicine platform for a hospital network. Clinicians who will use the system have been invited to every sprint review but attendance has dropped from twelve to two over the past four sprints. The product owner says the remaining clinicians represent the user group adequately. The project manager notices that the features accepted in recent reviews do not reflect the workflow patterns of the absent specialties. What should the project manager do?

An agile team delivering an avionics testing platform faces a persistent impediment: the test-environment provisioning process takes three days, which consumes a significant portion of each two-week sprint. The team has raised the issue in three consecutive retrospectives. The project manager has documented the impediment but has not taken action because the provisioning process is owned by another department. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a manufacturer is planning its release for an IoT platform. Two large epics in the backlog have vague acceptance criteria, unknown technical complexity, and dependencies on components the team has never used. The product owner wants both epics committed to the release plan immediately because the sponsor expects them. The team is uncomfortable committing without more information. Which TWO actions should the project manager take?

An agile team at a telecom company is delivering a customer self-service portal. Three business units are stakeholders: billing, technical support, and sales. Each has different expectations for the portal’s first release. Billing wants payment automation, support wants ticket routing, and sales wants lead capture. The product owner has been prioritizing billing features exclusively because the billing director is the most vocal advocate. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a telecom company is building a network-monitoring dashboard. The team’s working agreement specifies that all code must be peer-reviewed before merging. Under deadline pressure, two developers have been bypassing peer review and merging directly to meet sprint commitments. The shortcuts have not yet caused visible defects, but the practice undermines the team’s quality agreement. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a bank reports stable velocity of twenty-eight story points per sprint. The sponsor asks whether the project is succeeding. The product owner notes that the features delivered have not reduced the loan-processing time that the business case promised to improve. The team is delivering consistently but the business outcome has not moved. What should the project manager do?

An agile team has delivered eight sprints of a SaaS analytics platform. Every increment meets the Definition of Done and the product owner accepts it at sprint review. However, no increment has been released to actual users. The product owner says the product is not yet ready for real users and wants to add more features first. Users have never seen or used the platform. What should the project manager do?

A government agency’s agile team is building a citizen-feedback portal. During sprint review, a community advocacy group that represents underserved populations asks to be included as a stakeholder. The product owner says the group is not a paying customer and their input is not needed. The project charter states the portal must serve all citizen segments equitably. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a construction technology company delivers a project-estimating tool. Sprint burn-down charts show stories are being completed on time. However, the tool’s estimates for real construction projects have been inaccurate by fifteen to twenty percent, which is the quality problem the tool was built to solve. The product owner and team are focused on sprint metrics and have not measured the tool’s real-world accuracy. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a logistics firm is in its sixth sprint delivering a route-optimization system. The team has been consistently completing all planned stories, but the project manager notices that technical debt is accumulating: shortcuts taken in early sprints are making new feature development progressively slower. The product owner has not allocated any capacity for technical-debt reduction because it does not produce visible features. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a manufacturer is delivering an IoT monitoring platform. During sprint planning, the team discovers that a critical user story depends on a hardware component that has a twelve-week lead time. The story is needed in the next sprint but the component will not arrive for three months. The product owner wants to plan the sprint as if the component will arrive on time. What should the project manager do?

A software team has been using Scrum for three years. A new project involves maintaining a live production system where urgent fixes arrive unpredictably and cannot wait for sprint boundaries. The team finds itself constantly violating its sprint commitments to address production issues. The Scrum Master insists the team must protect its sprint commitments. What should the project manager facilitate?

An agile team has been using two-week Scrum sprints for an avionics-testing tool, but the work pattern has changed: urgent production-support requests now arrive daily and cannot wait for sprint boundaries. The team constantly breaks its sprint commitment to handle interrupts. The Scrum Master insists the team must protect its sprints. The project manager sees a fundamental mismatch between the method and the work pattern. Which TWO actions should the project manager take?

An agile team at an energy company is planning its release. The product owner wants to include a large epic that the team has not yet refined. The epic’s acceptance criteria are vague, its size is unknown, and no one on the team has experience with the underlying technology. The product owner insists it must be in the release plan because the sponsor asked for it. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at an energy company includes members from four countries working across three time zones. The team’s daily standup is scheduled at a time convenient for two time zones but falls at midnight for the third group, whose members have stopped attending. The absent members post written updates that others rarely read. Collaboration between the groups has declined and misunderstandings are increasing. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a logistics company has been tracking velocity and cycle time for twelve sprints. The metrics have been stable, but the project manager realizes no one has examined what the metrics are actually telling them. The team records numbers in a dashboard but never discusses trends, anomalies, or what actions the data might suggest. The metrics exist but are not informing decisions. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a hotel chain is starting a new project to build a guest-loyalty platform. The sponsor insists on a detailed Gantt chart with fixed milestones. The product owner and team prefer an adaptive backlog-driven approach. The project manager recognizes that the work involves significant uncertainty around guest-behavior data and that the platform’s features will evolve as early usage data arrives. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a bank is planning its next sprint. The product owner wants to commit to thirty-five story points based on the velocity the team achieved three sprints ago. However, the team’s velocity over the last three sprints has been twenty-five, twenty-eight, and twenty-six. The product owner argues the earlier sprint proves the team can do more if they focus. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a media company just completed its forming stage and is entering a phase where members openly disagree about technical approaches, coding standards, and task ownership. Two developers had a heated argument during sprint planning that left the rest of the team uncomfortable. The team lead asks the project manager to intervene and impose rules to prevent further conflict. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a retailer is building an inventory-optimization system. The warehouse operations manager, a key stakeholder, has become increasingly resistant after learning the system will change daily replenishment routines. The manager has begun discouraging warehouse staff from participating in user-acceptance sessions. Sprint deliveries continue on time, but the adoption risk is clearly growing as resistance spreads among the warehouse staff. What should the project manager do?

An agile cybersecurity team reports consistent velocity of thirty story points per sprint. The sponsor asks whether the project is on track to deliver its stated goal: reducing security-incident response time by forty percent. No one has connected velocity to incident-response improvement. The team tracks only sprint-level delivery metrics and has no outcome-level data. Which TWO actions should the project manager take?

An agile team delivering a transit-scheduling system has been running three-week sprints. The product owner asks the project manager whether the team should adopt a scaling framework because the backlog has grown large. The team is seven people, communication is direct, and there are no cross-team dependencies. The product owner’s real concern is that the large backlog feels overwhelming. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a retailer is starting a twelve-month product initiative. The sponsor wants a detailed roadmap showing exactly which features will be delivered each quarter. The product owner knows that user feedback will reshape priorities significantly. The project manager needs to provide governance-level visibility for the sponsor and the board without undermining the adaptive planning approach the team relies on. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a university is developing a research-collaboration platform. The team has been focused on delivering features but has not established any process for managing the project’s risks. The product owner assumes risks are handled automatically through iterative delivery. Last sprint, an unexpected data-migration issue consumed the entire sprint, and the team delivered nothing. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a cybersecurity firm is planning the next iteration. The product owner presents eight user stories, but the team identifies significant risks in two of them: one involves integration with a legacy system that has undocumented APIs, and the other requires handling sensitive personal data under a regulation the team has not encountered before. The product owner wants all eight stories committed. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a telecom company has delivered a network-provisioning tool in twelve sprints. The product owner accepted every increment, and the team considers the product done. However, the operations team reports that the tool frequently times out under real production load, a condition that was never tested because the Definition of Done did not include performance testing under production-scale volumes. Users are frustrated. What should the project manager do?

An agile team delivering a building-information-modeling platform has consistently high velocity but retrospectives reveal that members feel undervalued. The Scrum Master runs retrospectives but action items are never followed up. Team members say they have stopped raising real concerns because nothing changes. Morale is declining noticeably even as delivery metrics look strong, and two members have privately mentioned looking for other assignments. What should the project manager do?

An agile cybersecurity team has a critical skill dependency: only one member can perform threat-model reviews. That person is working extended hours and has expressed burnout. Two other team members have asked to learn threat modeling but have not been given the opportunity because the specialist says training would slow current delivery. The project manager recognizes both a sustainability risk and a team-development opportunity. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a logistics company recently lost its most experienced member to another project. The remaining team members are less experienced and their velocity has dropped by forty percent. The sponsor is pressing for the original delivery date to be maintained. The team is anxious about the gap and reluctant to commit to sprint goals. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at an insurer includes members who report to three different functional managers. During the sprint, the functional managers frequently pull team members into departmental work, disrupting sprint commitments. The team has missed its sprint goal in three consecutive sprints despite good planning. The team is frustrated and feels unable to honor its own commitments. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a hospital has just completed a major release and enters a new project phase. Two experienced members transferred out, and three new members joined who are unfamiliar with the team’s practices, tools, and domain. The team’s velocity dropped significantly, and established members are frustrated with the pace of onboarding. The sponsor is pressuring for the previous velocity to be restored immediately. Which TWO actions should the project manager take?

An agile team at a transit authority has delivered a passenger-feedback system. The sponsor asks for a project status report. The project manager has been tracking velocity, burn-up, and defect rates. The sponsor, however, wants to know whether passenger satisfaction has improved since the system launched, which is the success criterion in the project charter. The PM has not been measuring satisfaction. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at an energy company has delivered a smart-grid monitoring system. Every sprint increment met the Definition of Done and was accepted by the product owner. Now the operations team is about to take ownership but has no documentation, no training, and no understanding of how the system works. The agile team is scheduled to disband next week. Which TWO actions should the project manager take before the team disperses?

An agile team at a hotel chain delivers a revenue-management dashboard. The sponsor wants to know whether the project is generating a return on investment. The product owner tracks feature-completion rates and sprint velocity, which are both healthy. No one has connected the dashboard’s features to actual revenue impact. The sponsor needs evidence for the next board meeting. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a media company is in its eighth sprint. The project manager identifies two project-work issues: technical debt from early sprints is slowing new development by an estimated thirty percent, and a critical external content-feed integration has been blocked for five days because the provider has not responded to the team’s request. The product owner is focused solely on feature delivery. Which TWO actions should the project manager take?

An agile team has been delivering a smart-city data platform in two-week sprints. After eight sprints, the product owner and team realize they have been building features without ever releasing to real users. A potentially shippable increment exists at the end of each sprint, but the product owner keeps adding more features before any release. Users have never seen the platform. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a retailer is planning a twelve-month initiative to build a personalization engine. The sponsor needs a roadmap for board reporting but understands requirements will evolve. The product owner wants to plan only the next two sprints and refuses to look beyond them, arguing that long-range planning contradicts agile principles. The PM must provide governance visibility without sacrificing adaptive flexibility. Which TWO actions should the project manager take?

An agile team in a pharmaceutical company is developing a clinical-trial data platform. The regulatory-affairs team is a critical stakeholder but has consistently provided feedback only after increments are released, creating rework each sprint. The product owner has incorporated their feedback reactively, but the rework is consuming nearly a third of sprint capacity. The regulatory team says they are too busy to attend sprint reviews. What should the project manager do?

An agile software team’s only database expert has been working seventy-hour weeks because every database-related story depends on her. Two other developers have expressed interest in learning database skills but have not been given the opportunity. The specialist says cross-training would slow delivery. The project manager sees both a burnout risk and a team-development need. Which TWO actions should the project manager take?

An agile team at a bank is building a mobile-lending platform. The product owner engages regularly with the marketing department but has not spoken to the compliance team, which has authority over lending disclosures. After three sprints, compliance reviews the increment and identifies multiple regulatory gaps that require significant rework. The product owner is surprised because no one raised the issue earlier. What should the project manager have done to avoid this situation?

An agile team has been using two-week sprints for a university learning platform. After six sprints, the team and product owner realize that meaningful increments require more than two weeks because each feature needs integration testing with the university’s legacy student-records system. Stories are frequently carried over, and the team spends the first two days of each sprint on integration from the previous one. What should the project manager facilitate?

An agile team in a pharmaceutical company is delivering a regulatory-submission platform. The team follows all agile ceremonies, but the project manager observes that most real decisions are made outside of ceremonies in private conversations between the product owner and two senior developers. Other team members learn about decisions after they are made and feel excluded from the process. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at an energy company has delivered a grid-monitoring dashboard. The product owner accepted the final increment and considers the project done. However, the operations team that will use the dashboard has not been trained, no documentation exists, and no one in operations understands how to interpret the data the dashboard presents. The operations team is uncomfortable taking ownership. What should the project manager do?

An agile team delivering a building-management software system has been running smoothly for ten sprints. The project manager notices that the team has settled into a comfortable routine but has stopped improving its practices. Retrospective action items are formulaic, velocity is flat, and the team has not tried any new techniques or approaches in months. The team says everything is working fine. What should the project manager do?

A pharmaceutical company starts a new project to build a lab-data analytics platform. The regulatory team insists the project follow a traditional waterfall methodology because that is what auditors have seen before. The project manager knows the analytics requirements are unclear and will evolve as scientists interact with early prototypes. The technology stack is new to the organization and carries exploration risk. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a city agency is building a smart-parking platform. After the fourth sprint, a community advocacy group representing residents with disabilities contacts the project manager, saying the platform ignores accessible-parking needs. The product owner’s backlog has no accessibility items, and no one engaged this group during initiation. The next sprint is about to start. Which TWO actions should the project manager take?

An agile team at a retailer has been delivering an e-commerce platform in two-week sprints. The product owner reports that three features released over the past month are seeing very low customer usage. The team is already building the next set of features on the roadmap. The product owner has not analyzed why the released features are underperforming and has no plans to do so. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a government agency is developing a public-services portal. During release planning, the team identifies that several planned features require accessibility testing that takes five days per feature. This testing dependency means not all planned features can be completed within the release window. The product owner wants to skip accessibility testing for lower-priority features to fit everything in. What should the project manager do?

An agile team delivering a clinical-decision-support system has just completed a sprint increment that the product owner accepted. However, the increment has not been validated by clinical stakeholders who will use it for patient-care decisions. The product owner says acceptance at sprint review is sufficient. The project manager knows the increment will influence real clinical decisions once deployed. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a government agency has been delivering increments of a citizen-services platform for ten sprints. Each increment was accepted by the product owner, but no increment has been deployed to production. A policy change means the platform must now be live within four weeks. The team has never performed a production deployment, and no deployment pipeline exists. What should the project manager do immediately?

An agile team at a media company delivers a content-publishing platform. The team’s Definition of Done includes unit tests, integration tests, and performance testing. Over the last three sprints, the team has been marking stories as done without completing performance testing, arguing that performance can be addressed in a hardening sprint before release. User-facing latency has not been measured. What should the project manager do?

A company is starting a project to develop a new customer-facing mobile application. Requirements are unclear and expected to evolve based on user feedback. Time to market is critical, and the sponsor wants to release a minimum viable product within three months. The organization has experience with both predictive and adaptive approaches. The project manager is recommending the development approach. What should the project manager recommend?

An agile team at a manufacturer is building a supply-chain visibility dashboard. After the fifth sprint, the procurement director, who was not initially identified as a stakeholder, contacts the project manager to say the dashboard must integrate with the procurement system. The integration was never discussed, and adding it would affect several completed stories. The product owner says the backlog is already prioritized and there is no room. What should the project manager do first?

An agile team at a pharmaceutical company is developing a clinical-data platform. The product owner wants the project manager to forecast when the remaining forty backlog items will be completed. The team’s velocity has ranged from fifteen to twenty-two story points per sprint over the last six sprints. The product owner wants a single firm date to share with the regulatory team. What should the project manager do?

An agile team is building a student-success platform for a university. Faculty members are critical stakeholders but have been largely disengaged, attending only one of the past six sprint reviews. The product owner says faculty feedback is not essential since administrative data drives the platform. The project manager knows that faculty will be the primary users once deployed. Low adoption would undermine the project’s purpose. Which TWO actions should the project manager take?

An agile team at an insurer is delivering a policy-administration platform. The team follows all ceremonies and delivers consistently, but knowledge is siloed: each module is understood by only one developer. When that person is absent, no one can maintain or extend their module. The team has never practiced pair programming or cross-training, and no formal knowledge-sharing mechanism exists. What should the project manager do?

An agile team is starting a project to build a patient-portal for a hospital. The product owner has a long list of desired features but has not organized them by value or urgency. The team is eager to begin the first sprint and suggests pulling the most technically interesting features first. The hospital’s primary goal is reducing phone-call volume to the appointment desk. What should the project manager do?

An agile team at a software company has been self-organizing for several sprints. The project manager notices that one senior developer consistently assigns tasks to junior members without discussion, overriding the team’s collaborative selection during sprint planning. Junior members have stopped volunteering for tasks. The senior developer argues they are ensuring the best technical outcomes. What should the project manager do?