PMP Q #50- Unhappy Stakeholders
Q50. Some stakeholders are unhappy about your teams priority in the current iteration.
What is the best thing to do in such a situation?
A: Proposal replanning of the current iteration.
B: Explain the prioritization process and ask for feedback.
C: Assure stakeholders to include their priorities in the next iterations.
D: Ask the stakeholders to raise a change request.
Let’s see the project scenario in detail –
You are running in a current iteration, and a few stakeholders tell you that whatever you guys picked up for this iteration is not the proper priority. And it would be best if you were working on something else. Such things are common because there are many stakeholders in a project, and you need to take the best possible priority, which is coming out from your Backlog Refinement process, and the team get started based on that. So you have done Backlog Refinement. Still, people are unhappy about it. Now, in question, there is no apparent need coming in, which is saying that these stakeholders are the ones who are right. They might have their opinion, which you want to understand. So proposing planning the current iteration and disturbing it isn’t the right thing to do.
So option A, which is about replanning the current iteration, is unsuitable.
Option B suggests explaining the prioritisation process and asking for feedback. That is a good option. You need to explain the overall iteration goal and how the team selected items based on that. But you may need to review the prioritization process. Based on feedback, you may realize that the current stakeholder group participating in the backlog refinement meeting may not represent the stakeholders you need in the Backlog Refinement process. So you need to understand the stakeholder engagement plan. It would be best to see who the stakeholders are and who needs to be engaged more, which might result in your backlog refinement process becoming more consulting with those stakeholders.
Now option C says to assure stakeholders to include their priorities in the next iteration. But, unfortunately, you can’t keep that promise as such patchwork is not a good idea team relook priorities in the backlog refinement process.
Option D says to ask stakeholders to raise a change request. In Agile, requirements are emergent and submitting a change request is not needed. However, you may need a change request for purposes other than requirements that you can identify as per our change management plan.
So looking at whatever is available in this question, option B is good.
