Your agile project to modernize a healthcare claims processing system has been running for five months with three-week sprints. The team has been successfully delivering functional increments, but you discover that the compliance officer has not been reviewing any deliverables because they were not included in sprint reviews. A regulatory audit is scheduled in six weeks, and the compliance officer now states that three completed features do not meet HIPAA requirements and cannot be deployed. The product owner is frustrated because compliance requirements were not in the original user stories. Rework will take approximately four sprints. What should be your primary focus to address this situation?

Question

Accepted Answer

The correct answer is C. Option C is correct because it addresses multiple critical needs simultaneously: understanding the root cause of the stakeholder engagement failure (ECO Process Task 3.1), establishing sustainable working agreements that prevent recurrence, and finding a pragmatic path forward that balances compliance requirements with the urgent audit deadline. The collaborative session enables shared understanding and collective ownership of both the problem and solution, which is essential for agile success. Option B is the main distractor and addresses important tactical elements, but it jumps to solution mode without understanding why compliance was excluded initially or establishing how to prevent similar issues. Simply adding criteria and re-prioritizing doesn't address the relationship gaps or create sustainable stakeholder engagement patterns. Option A is too narrow, focusing only on process changes without addressing the immediate four-sprint rework problem or examining root causes. Option D avoids the underlying collaboration and requirements definition problems while creating parallel work streams that could lead to further integration issues.

PMP Practice Question: Process — Agile, Hard

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