Your distributed agile team spans three time zones (San Francisco, New York, and London) with 3-4 members in each location. After four sprints, several patterns have emerged: the London team members are disconnected from decisions made during daily standups that occur at 9 AM Pacific; sprint planning sessions run 4-5 hours as teams debate estimates and approach; and sprint reviews lack engagement because stakeholders in Europe attend at 7 PM their time. The team's definition of done includes peer code review, but reviews are delayed 12-16 hours waiting for reviewers in other time zones. One team member has suggested abandoning agile practices in favor of a more asynchronous waterfall approach. What strategy would most effectively address these distributed team challenges?

Question

Accepted Answer

The correct answer is D. Option D is correct because it preserves team cohesion and agile collaboration while pragmatically addressing timezone constraints (ECO Process Task 4.1 - Build team charter and structure). Core hours enable real-time collaboration for key activities, compressed ceremonies reduce meeting fatigue, and cross-training solves the code review bottleneck while building team resilience. This approach maintains a single team identity rather than fragmenting it. Option A eliminates valuable real-time collaboration and can reduce team bonding and problem-solving effectiveness—asynchronous standups often become status reports rather than coordination sessions. Option B fragments the team and creates new dependencies and integration challenges, essentially creating three mini-projects. Option C's follow-the-sun approach sounds efficient but in practice creates significant handoff overhead, knowledge loss, and coordination complexity that rarely delivers the promised productivity gains for agile teams.

PMP Practice Question: Process — Agile, Hard

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