PMI-ACP Practice Questions #28
After reviewing the impact of past releases, some stakeholders express concerns about how value estimates are assigned to features. They highlight discrepancies between expected and observed outcomes, questioning the team’s ability to deliver value consistently. As an Agile practitioner, how would you address these concerns to improve confidence in future value delivery?
A. Recommend revisiting the prioritization approach to include a broader range of inputs and perspectives from stakeholders, ensuring value estimation is more inclusive.
B. Propose creating a benefits hypothesis for each feature to ensure assumptions are clearly defined, tracked, and validated against observed outcomes post-release.
C. Involve the concerned stakeholders in the prioritization process to ensure their perspectives are reflected in the decision-making for upcoming features.
D. Reassure stakeholders that value discrepancies are normal in Agile projects and suggest monitoring metrics only after the product is fully developed.
Analysis
Stakeholders have raised concerns about the discrepancy between expected and actual value delivery in past releases. They are questioning how value estimates are assigned to features and whether the team is consistently delivering value. The key issue is improving confidence in future value delivery by ensuring that value assumptions are well-tracked and validated.
Analysis of Options
A: Recommend revisiting the prioritization approach to include a broader range of inputs and perspectives from stakeholders, ensuring value estimation is more inclusive.
This option suggests improving the prioritization process by incorporating a wider range of inputs. While including diverse perspectives can enhance prioritization, the question is focused on validating whether features deliver the expected value, not just improving prioritization. Without a structured way to track assumptions and outcomes, revising prioritization alone may not fully address the stakeholders’ concerns.
B: Propose creating a benefits hypothesis for each feature to ensure assumptions are clearly defined, tracked, and validated against observed outcomes post-release.
This option directly addresses the problem by introducing a structured approach to defining, tracking, and validating value assumptions. Instead of only revisiting how features are prioritized, this approach ensures that each feature has a clear hypothesis about its expected benefit, which can then be validated after release. This aligns with Lean Startup principles, which emphasize continuous learning and data-driven decision-making. By tracking real-world outcomes, the team can refine future value estimates and improve stakeholder confidence.
C: Involve the concerned stakeholders in the prioritization process to ensure their perspectives are reflected in the decision-making for upcoming features.
While stakeholder involvement is important, this option only focuses on addressing concerns by including stakeholders in prioritization, rather than addressing the fundamental issue of validating value realization. Simply involving stakeholders in future prioritization does not ensure that features will deliver the expected value—it only ensures that their opinions are heard. The real challenge is to track whether prioritization decisions actually lead to business value.
D: Reassure stakeholders that value discrepancies are normal in Agile projects and suggest monitoring metrics only after the product is fully developed.
This option completely ignores the need for early validation and continuous learning. Agile principles encourage fast feedback and incremental validation rather than waiting until a product is fully developed. Telling stakeholders to wait until the end contradicts Agile’s emphasis on iterative learning and delivering value continuously. This option is not aligned with Agile best practices.
Conclusion
The best answer is Option B, as it introduces a structured method to track and validate value assumptions, ensuring that stakeholders’ concerns about discrepancies are systematically addressed. By defining benefit hypotheses, the team can continuously learn from actual outcomes, improve prioritization, and enhance confidence in future value delivery.
This question maps to Lean Startup thinking, continuous learning, and feedback loops, which are essential in Agile product development.
PMI – ACP Exam Content Outline Mapping
| Domain | Task |
| Mindset | Experiment Early |
| Mindset | Shorten Feedback Loops |
| Product | Manage Value Delivery |
Topics Covered:
- Experiment with defining benefit hypotheses to validate feature impact
- Shorten feedback loops by tracking and analyzing observed outcomes post-release
- Manage value delivery through data-driven decision-making and refinement
- Improve prioritization by ensuring transparency in value estimation
- Enhance stakeholder confidence by providing measurable insights on delivered value
- Incorporate Lean Startup principles to iteratively validate business value
- Continuously refine value assumptions based on real-world feedback
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