PMI DASM Practice Test - Questions Answers, Page 4

Disciplined Agile (DA) provides a solid foundation for business agility through multiple mechanisms, including:

B . Defining a framework for agility at scale: DA offers a comprehensive toolkit that supports scaling agile practices across an organization, integrating principles from various agile methodologies to ensure coherence and alignment.

D . Providing guidance to streamline processes in a context-sensitive manner: DA emphasizes tailoring processes to the specific context of the organization, project, or team, rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach. This flexibility allows organizations to adapt more effectively to change and improve their agility.

A . Enforcing adherence to organizational standards contradicts the DA principle of pragmatism and flexibility.

C . Creating awesome teams that foster joy is beneficial but is not specifically cited as foundational for business agility.

E . Describing trade-offs is part of DA's decision-making framework but not directly a way of providing a foundation for business agility.

Thus, the correct answers are B. Defines a framework for agility at scale and D. Provides guidance to streamline processes in a context-sensitive manner.

Address Changing Stakeholder Needs: This process goal involves actively engaging with stakeholders to understand and respond to their evolving requirements, preferences, and concerns throughout the project's life cycle. This goal is dynamic and requires significant effort because stakeholder needs and priorities can change frequently, requiring continuous adjustment of the Agile strategy. Tailoring your strategy to effectively address these needs involves multiple activities, such as conducting frequent reviews, reprioritizing the backlog, aligning deliverables with stakeholder expectations, and incorporating feedback into the development process.

Why It Requires the Most Effort:

Dynamic Nature of Stakeholder Needs: Stakeholders' needs are often unpredictable and can change rapidly due to market shifts, regulatory changes, or new business priorities. This requires Agile teams to be highly adaptive and frequently recalibrate their strategies.

Continuous Engagement and Communication: Maintaining an ongoing dialogue with stakeholders, gathering feedback, and negotiating trade-offs consume considerable time and resources.

Alignment and Consensus Building: Repeated effort is needed to ensure that all stakeholders are aligned and that there is a consensus on the direction and scope of the project.

Incorrect Options:

A . Improve Quality: While improving quality is a significant goal in any Agile strategy, it is more focused on refining existing processes, techniques, and tools rather than continuously adapting to external changes. Thus, it may not require as much continuous effort in tailoring the Agile strategy.

C . Align with Enterprise Direction: This goal involves ensuring that the team's work aligns with the broader organizational objectives. While important, it is generally a less dynamic activity compared to addressing changing stakeholder needs and may not require as frequent adjustments once alignment is initially achieved.

D . Explore Scope: Exploring the scope is an initial activity in an Agile project where the team works to understand the project's boundaries and deliverables. Although this requires effort at the beginning of the project, it is not a continuous effort throughout the project life cycle like addressing changing stakeholder needs.

Therefore, 'Address Changing Stakeholder Needs' is the process goal that requires the most effort due to its dynamic nature and the continuous engagement required to adapt the Agile strategy to evolving conditions.

In Disciplined Agile (DA), the Team Member role is primarily responsible for building the product correctly. Team Members are the individuals who directly create the product by writing code, testing, designing, and performing other tasks necessary to deliver a working solution. The Architecture Owner may guide architectural decisions, and the Team Lead may facilitate processes, but it is the Team Members who actively build the product and ensure it meets the required standards and specifications.

PMI Disciplined Agile (DA) Toolkit, which clarifies the responsibilities of the various roles, specifying that Team Members are the ones actively involved in building the product.

PMI, 'Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW),' which details the responsibilities of Team Members in delivering the product.

In Disciplined Agile, a good Team Lead (or Scrum Master) should act as a servant leader, supporting and enabling team members to succeed. When a team member is falling behind, the appropriate response is to have a conversation with the team member to understand what is getting in their way and work together to find solutions. This approach fosters an environment of trust and collaboration and helps to identify and remove impediments that may be affecting the team member's performance. The goal is to address the root cause of the issue and provide support, rather than assigning blame or creating discomfort.

PMI Disciplined Agile (DA) Toolkit, which emphasizes servant leadership, coaching, and supporting team members to overcome obstacles.

PMI, 'Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW),' which discusses the role of the Team Lead in fostering a supportive and collaborative team environment.

In Disciplined Agile, the team members are responsible for defining the amount of work to be completed during an iteration based on their understanding of the team's current capacity. This is aligned with Agile principles that promote self-organizing teams and emphasize the importance of team members making commitments based on their realistic assessment of what they can achieve. This collaborative decision-making process helps to ensure that the team is neither over-committing nor under-utilizing its capacity, leading to sustainable delivery and higher quality outcomes.

PMI Agile Practice Guide, which supports the principle of team autonomy in deciding how much work they can complete in an iteration.

PMI Disciplined Agile (DA) Toolkit, which promotes self-organization and team-based decision-making regarding workload capacity.

During an iteration demo (also known as an iteration review), the team presents the work completed during the iteration to stakeholders and obtains feedback. This feedback is crucial for ensuring that the team is delivering the desired value and making adjustments as needed for future iterations. The demo provides an opportunity for the product owner and other stakeholders to inspect the product increment and provide input that can be used to refine the backlog and guide the team's efforts.

B . Retrospective is focused on team improvement rather than obtaining product feedback.

C . Iteration planning is for planning the work to be done, not gathering feedback.

D . Daily stand-up/coordination meeting is used for team synchronization and does not involve external feedback.

An iteration backlog (or sprint backlog) is created at the beginning of each sprint during the iteration planning meeting. This backlog consists of the tasks and user stories that the team commits to completing during the iteration. The process involves selecting the highest-priority items from the product backlog and breaking them down into smaller tasks that can be completed within the sprint timeframe.

A . Planning the Kanban board does not typically use an iteration backlog as Kanban is flow-based, not iteration-based.

B . At the beginning of each project is incorrect because the backlog is created for each sprint, not the entire project.

C . When defining the MBI (Minimum Business Increment) is related to identifying the smallest unit of value delivery but is not when an iteration backlog is created.

A long-lived (or stable) team is a group of individuals who work together over an extended period, typically across multiple projects or product increments. In the context of PMI's Disciplined Agile (DA) framework, having a long-lived team is beneficial for several reasons:

Trustworthy (A): As team members work together over time, they build a strong sense of trust. Trust within a team is foundational for effective collaboration, decision-making, and conflict resolution. Team members learn to rely on each other's skills and knowledge, leading to more effective and efficient work processes. Disciplined Agile emphasizes creating environments where trust can be fostered, which is more easily achieved in stable, long-lived teams.

Highly Collaborative (C): Long-lived teams develop a rhythm of working together, which leads to high levels of collaboration. As team members become more familiar with each other's working styles, strengths, and weaknesses, they can communicate more effectively, align on goals more quickly, and coordinate their efforts more efficiently. This heightened collaboration accelerates delivery, improves quality, and fosters continuous improvement---key principles in the Disciplined Agile toolkit.

Incorrect Options:

B . Projectized: While the concept of a 'projectized' organization focuses on structuring around projects, this does not inherently relate to the benefits of having a long-lived team. In contrast, Disciplined Agile promotes stable teams over project-centric teams to maximize the value delivery and learning curve.

D . Specifically resourced: This option refers to the allocation of specific resources for projects or tasks, which does not directly align with the idea of having a stable, long-term team.

E . Ability to multi-task: Multi-tasking is generally not considered a benefit within agile frameworks, including Disciplined Agile. Multi-tasking can lead to inefficiency and reduced focus, which goes against the principles of optimizing flow and delivering value quickly.

Thus, the most appropriate answers that align with the principles of Disciplined Agile are A. Trustworthy and C. Highly collaborative

The key attributes of a leader in an agile context include the ability to focus on goals, inspire trust, and take risks. Agile leaders guide their teams by keeping a clear vision of the goals, building trust through transparency and integrity, and being willing to take calculated risks to achieve desired outcomes. They do not simply 'go with the flow' or assign tasks in a top-down manner; instead, they empower their teams, foster a culture of trust, and support innovation by encouraging risk-taking within safe-to-fail boundaries.

PMI Disciplined Agile (DA) Toolkit, which describes the characteristics of effective leaders, including goal focus, trust-building, and risk-taking.

PMI Agile Practice Guide, which provides insights into leadership attributes that promote agile success.