PMP Q #29- Ensure Process Compliance
Q29. Which of the following techniques can an agile team use to ensure project activities comply with organisational and project policies, processes, and procedures?
A. Quality Audit
B. Frequent Delivery
C. Backlog Refinement
D. Iteration Review
This question is asking how you ensure organizational-level process compliance.
First, let’s explore options most relevant to Agile Approaches – Frequent Delivery, Backlog Refinement, and Iteration Review.
Frequent Delivery: In Agile, the team plans to deliver frequently every couple of weeks or so. It helps to release product features early to stakeholders and customers, ensuring the team receives feedback regularly to evolve product features continuously.
Frequent Deliveries do not help to comply with organisational and project policies, processes, and procedures.
There could be a violation of organisation policies when the team is still delivering frequently.
Backlog Refinement: Product backlog refinement is an activity to clean and order the Product Backlog. It is an activity where the team can add or remove items, change items’ priority, split big to small sizes, etc., to the product backlog.
Sometimes the team may add an item to the Product Backlog because of organisational policies and procedures. But directly, Backlog Refinement is not contributing to ensuring project activities comply with organisational and project policies, processes, and procedures.
Iteration Review: After every iteration timebox, the team shows the completed work to the stakeholders in the iteration review meeting. This meeting helps to know if the team is working in the right direction, which features need further improvement, and which features the team should have developed as per expectations and need improvement. Iteration Review does not help to comply with organisational and project policies, processes, and procedures.
So, which option is left? – Option A – “Quality Audit”
Quality Audit seems traditional; professionals who belong to Agile hardly hear this kind of term or word.
But when preparing for the PMP exam, you can assume that there could be a mix-up of agile approaches and project management terminologies. So you need to get into the essence of these terminologies even in the Agile world.
Quality audit is the process of systematic examination of organisational and project policies, processes, and procedures. In Agile, you may do a Quality Audit –
- During Retrospective meetings, mainly to reflect on improvement areas in procedures.
- During iteration, and
- During some occasional special audit meetings
So, you may not have a special meeting called Quality Audit. It is a kind of work. It’s not a necessity. Meeting
But in general, a Quality Audit is to ensure that the team adheres to the organisation’s processes and policies.
So the correct answer is – Quality Audit, which ensures project activities comply with organisational and project policies, processes, and procedures.
