PMP Q#12 – Handling negative feedback received during the iteration review meeting
Q12. In the iteration review meeting, your team received the following feedback:
-The completed stories are not on business priority
-The team has not tested the stories for compliance requirements.
Overall, stakeholders are not satisfied with the work. What should the Project Manager do next?
A. Work with stakeholders and take formal, detailed feedback
B. Work with the Product Owner to ensure the requirement prioritisation
C. Revisit the Definition of Done
D. Work with the project team in the retrospective meeting to identify the next steps.
Here, the question is asking – “What should the Project Manager do next?” – Let’s see all options before deciding which is the best thing to do as the next step?
Option A – “Work with stakeholders and take formal, detailed feedback” – Yes, it could be a good idea for a project manager if he/she sees value in getting more information from the stakeholders.
Option B – “Work with the Product Owner to ensure requirement prioritisation” Here, it is clear that requirement prioritisation was missing, so the Product Owner should fix the issue related to the requirement prioritisation. So, working with the Product Owner could be a good idea here.
Option C – “Revisit Definition of Done” – It seems that compliance requirements are not included in the Definition of Done. So probably, the project manager needs to revisit the definition of compliance requirements or Definition of Done. In this way, this is also a probable right option.
Option D – “Work with a project team in the retrospective meeting to identify the next steps. “ After the iteration review meeting, the team usually does a retrospective meeting, which is a good place to talk about feedback received during the retrospective meeting. During a Retrospective meeting, the team strives to find out in collaboration with relevant people –
How to improve on something that happened in the previous iterations and develop an action plan for improvements. The goal is to bring better alignment for Business value delivery for the upcoming iterations.
During the retrospective meeting, If needed team also revisits the Definition of Done and might look at – what all compliance requirements should be a part of DoD for the completion of each product backlog item. During the retrospective meeting, instead of adding compliance requirements in the DoD, there could be an agreement to add a separate item in the Product Backlog for compliance requirements. A retrospective is an opportunity where the team reflect to see what went wrong and what has to be improved, so requirement prioritisation issues discovered during iteration review can also be discussed here. This meeting uses a facilitative approach which is always the best thing compared to one-on-one conversations. Such discussion might result in more team collaboration with the Product Owner and stakeholders. It also may result in an agreement for better involvement of the right people in the backlog refinement.
So, depending upon the type and nature of the project, these things will get fixed, and the team can find out while working as one group.
In this way, Option D is the best option as the next step. Sometimes you have more than one possible action for a given situation, but you need to identify the best.
