PMP Practice: Obtain Stakeholder Agreement on Scope

In agile frameworks, the team determines how much work they can commit to based on their demonstrated velocity and capacity. The product owner prioritizes work but does not dictate team capacity. When there is tension between stakeholder demands and team capacity, the project manager's role is to facilitate collaborative prioritization so the highest-value work is delivered sustainably. The scenario explicitly states the team has not yet committed, the product owner wants more than historical velocity supports, and developers are concerned about quality impacts. The most effective approach is to facilitate a conversation where Kenji identifies which stories provide the most value for the investor demo, and the team commits to a realistic amount based on their eight-story-point velocity. This respects team self-organization, maintains quality standards, and focuses on delivering maximum business value within constraints. The closing fact that developers are already expressing quality concerns makes it clear that overcommitting would be inappropriate.

**Why not A:** Escalating to the project sponsor to decide whether quality standards should be relaxed is inappropriate because quality standards should not be compromised to meet a deadline. The agile framework gives the team authority over how much work they commit to, and this is a capacity question, not a quality trade-off decision for the sponsor.

**Why not B:** Accepting all twelve stories despite the team's demonstrated eight-point velocity forces an unrealistic commitment. Coaching the team to increase velocity during the sprint is not a viable strategy since velocity is based on demonstrated capacity, not effort manipulation. This approach overrides team self-organization and risks quality and morale.

**Why not D:** Asking the product owner to defer all new stories to Sprint 4 ignores the legitimate business need for the investor demo. While focusing on technical debt is sometimes appropriate, the scenario calls for collaborative prioritization to deliver maximum value for the demo within the team's capacity, not outright rejection of the business need.