PMI-ACP Practice Questions #18
Your organization is running an agile initiative involving three cross-functional teams. These teams rely on three shared resources: database specialists, UI experts, and security experts. Due to the lack of coordination, dependencies between teams are causing delays and bottlenecks. How should you as an Agile Practitioner address this situation?
A. Establish a dependency board to track and visualize inter-team dependencies, ensuring proactive management of shared resources and dependencies.
B. Create a centralized team of shared specialists who can prioritize tasks and resolve dependencies for all teams.
C. Introduce Scrum of Scrums to facilitate regular coordination among team representatives, ensuring dependencies and resource needs are identified and managed collaboratively.
D. Implement a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) to introduce a structured approach for managing dependencies and coordinating resources
Analysis
The scenario describes an Agile initiative involving three cross-functional teams that depend on three shared resources (database specialists, UI experts, and security experts). Due to lack of coordination, dependencies are causing delays and bottlenecks.
As an Agile Practitioner, the goal is to improve coordination and collaboration while ensuring that teams remain empowered and bottlenecks are reduced. The best approach would be to establish a structured yet flexible mechanism that allows teams to collaborate and manage dependencies proactively.
A Scrum of Scrums is a well-known Agile practice designed specifically for inter-team coordination and ensures that dependencies are managed collaboratively rather than centrally controlled.
Analysis of Options
A: Establish a dependency board to track and visualize inter-team dependencies, ensuring proactive management of shared resources and dependencies.
- Tracking and visualizing dependencies is a great practice in Agile, and an information radiator (such as a dependency board) can help teams understand where the bottlenecks exist.
- However, this does not solve the root cause of coordination issues—it merely provides visibility.
- It also puts ownership on one entity rather than fostering collaboration among teams.
- Better than some other choices but not the best solution.
B: Create a centralized team of shared specialists who can prioritize tasks and resolve dependencies for all teams.
- This approach creates a bottleneck rather than solving the problem.
- Agile promotes empowerment and self-organization rather than centralizing decision-making.
- Having a specialized dependency resolution team may slow down the process instead of improving it.
- Not aligned with Agile principles, so this is not the right choice.
C: Introduce Scrum of Scrums to facilitate regular coordination among team representatives, ensuring dependencies and resource needs are identified and managed collaboratively.
- This is the best choice.
- Scrum of Scrums is a well-established Agile practice that allows teams to collaborate across teams while maintaining autonomy.
- It enables proactive identification of dependencies and ensures shared resources are managed in a distributed manner.
- This aligns perfectly with Agile’s principle of self-organization and cross-team collaboration.
D: Implement a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) to introduce a structured approach for managing dependencies and coordinating resources.
- SAFe is a large-scale transformation framework that involves multiple teams (5–12 in an Agile Release Train), but this scenario only describes three teams.
- Implementing SAFe is a major organizational change that requires significant management involvement and restructuring, which is not necessary for solving this immediate problem.
- Too big of a solution for the given problem, making it unnecessary at this stage.
Conclusion
The correct answer is Option C: Introduce Scrum of Scrums to facilitate regular coordination among team representatives, ensuring dependencies and resource needs are identified and managed collaboratively.
This approach ensures collaboration, visibility, and shared responsibility while maintaining Agile principles of empowerment and self-organization. It is practical, lightweight, and effective for the given scenario.
PMI – ACP Exam Content Outline Mapping
| Domain | Task |
| Mindset | Promote Collaborative Team Environment |
| Delivery | Optimize flow |
Topics Covered:
- Establish a process to update and maintain progress-tracking data.
- Ensure continuous information sharing to improve coordination across teams.
- Make status, progress, risks, and impediments accessible to all teams.
- Establish a feedback loop to enhance cross-team collaboration.
- Define communication strategies for co-located and distributed teams.
- Use collaboration practices to break down silos and manage dependencies.
- Evaluate the team’s Agile maturity to tailor the approach for dependency management.
- Encourage commitment to team decisions even in cases of disagreement.
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