During the eighth sprint of a financial services product, a regulatory compliance requirement emerges that affects the system's data retention architecture. The compliance officer estimates implementation requires 320 hours of effort, equivalent to four full sprints of the eight-person team's capacity. The product owner has a committed release date in six sprints to support a major client contract worth $2.3M annually. The current product backlog contains 180 story points of features promised for this release. The team's average velocity is 45 story points per sprint. How should the team approach this situation?

Question

Accepted Answer

The correct answer is A. Option A is correct because it applies agile principles of iterative delivery, early risk reduction, and collaborative decision-making to balance competing constraints (ECO Process Task 3.10). A spike provides information for informed decisions, decomposition enables incremental value delivery, and collaboration with stakeholders ensures the minimum viable approach meets actual regulatory needs rather than gold-plating. Option B is a common distractor that appears responsible but violates agile's incremental delivery principle and doesn't explore whether all 320 hours are truly required upfront. Option C ignores Brooks's Law (adding people to late projects makes them later) and the coordination overhead of parallel workstreams. Option D creates unacceptable regulatory and business risk—compliance violations can result in penalties far exceeding the contract value.

PMP Practice Question: Process — Agile, Hard

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