Your organization is transitioning to hybrid project management. You are managing a project where requirements gathering and architecture design follow a plan-driven approach, while development and testing use Scrum with two-week sprints. After three sprints, the cumulative flow diagram shows that completed story points are consistently 20% below the planned velocity, while the predictive architecture work is on schedule. Stakeholders are concerned about meeting the final delivery date. What should be your primary focus?

Question

Accepted Answer

The correct answer is A. Before making scope, schedule, or resource adjustments, understanding the root cause of performance variance is essential. The velocity gap could result from over-optimistic estimates, impediments, dependencies on incomplete architecture work, or team capacity issues. Option A follows the principle of inspection and adaptation by gathering data before making decisions. Option C is the main distractor because reducing scope might be the eventual solution, but jumping to that conclusion without understanding why velocity is low could result in cutting the wrong items or missing an easily correctable impediment. Options B and D make resource and timeline changes without evidence that these address the actual problem.

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