PMP Practice Question: People — Agile, Hard
You are coaching a newly formed agile team that includes several experienced developers who previously worked in traditional waterfall projects. Three sprints in, you observe a concerning pattern: the most senior developer, who has 15 years of experience, consistently dominates technical discussions and story estimation sessions. Other team members, including two junior developers with fresh perspectives on modern technologies, have stopped offering alternative approaches. During planning poker, team members increasingly just agree with the senior developer's estimates without discussion. You also notice the senior developer has started assigning tasks to others rather than allowing the team to self-organize during sprint planning. Sprint retrospectives have become superficial, with no one raising concerns. What is the most effective way to restore healthy team dynamics?
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More People Questions
View all →You are leading a manufacturing facility construction project following a predictive lifecycle. The project team consists of 15 members, including contractors and internal staff. After three months of work, you receive feedback from several team members that the weekly status meetings are too long and not productive. Team members feel they spend too much time listening to updates irrelevant to their work. The meetings currently last 90 minutes and cover all work packages. What is the best approach to address this concern?
A cross-functional agile team is preparing for their next sprint. During sprint planning, the QA specialist expresses concern that the team has been committing to user stories without adequately considering testing effort. She feels that her input is often sought too late in the process, after developers have already estimated and committed to stories. This has resulted in quality issues and testing becoming a bottleneck in the last two sprints. The team wants to improve but is unsure how to better integrate QA perspective earlier. What should the team do?
Your organization is piloting agile practices within traditionally predictive portfolios. You're leading a hybrid project with a co-located agile team and distributed predictive workstreams across three continents. After four months, you notice the agile team has strong cohesion and high performance, but the distributed predictive teams report feeling disconnected and undervalued. Several key resources from the predictive workstreams have requested transfers, citing lack of engagement. Executive stakeholders are questioning whether the hybrid approach is sustainable. What is the MOST effective way to address this disparity?