PMP Practice: Recommend a Project Execution Strategy

In agile environments with multiple interdependent teams, collaborative planning is essential to identify and resolve dependencies before they cause delays. The most effective approach is bringing the teams together in a cross-team refinement session where they can directly discuss dependencies, understand each other's commitments, and collaboratively adjust sprint plans. This fosters shared understanding, allows teams to negotiate trade-offs in real-time, and ensures that dependent work is sequenced properly across teams. Given that Team Beta has already planned Sprint 7 work that conflicts with their dependency on Cosmo Reyes-Nakashima's deliverable, immediate collaborative replanning is needed. The scenario's closing fact—that the product owner is already concerned about out-of-sequence delivery before Sprint 10—indicates this coordination must happen proactively during planning, not reactively during execution.

**Why not B:** While documenting dependencies is helpful, distributing a matrix for independent adjustment misses the core issue: teams need collaborative dialogue to truly understand dependencies and negotiate realistic sequencing. Team leads adjusting plans in isolation can lead to misalignment, optimistic assumptions, and continued integration problems. Dependencies in agile environments are best resolved through conversation and joint commitment, not documentation alone.

**Why not C:** The product owner owns backlog priority but cannot unilaterally dictate sprint-level sequencing across multiple teams. Agile teams are self-organizing and pull work based on capacity and capability. Simply reordering the product backlog doesn't address the fact that Team Beta has already planned Sprint 7 work and needs to collaboratively replan with Cosmo Reyes-Nakashima. This approach undermines team autonomy and doesn't create the shared understanding needed for effective integration.

**Why not D:** Weekly integration meetings are useful for ongoing coordination but are reactive rather than proactive. The scenario describes an immediate planning problem: Team Beta's Sprint 7 plan conflicts with their dependency on Cosmo Reyes-Nakashima's work. Waiting for a weekly meeting to surface this issue means Sprint 7 will proceed with misaligned plans, likely causing the exact delivery delays the product owner fears. The teams need to address this dependency now during planning, not discover it later during execution.