PMP Practice: Apply Intervention Strategies

The immediate priority is to remove the impediment blocking value delivery. The development team has produced work that cannot be released due to an unforeseen regulatory issue introduced by a stakeholder who was not previously engaged. The most effective recovery action is to bring all relevant parties together immediately — development team, product owner, and legal team — to understand the specific compliance gaps and collaboratively determine how to address them. This transparent, collaborative approach aligns with agile principles of cross-functional problem-solving and removes ambiguity about what needs to change. The team cannot make meaningful progress on new features until they understand whether their current architecture and approach can meet regulatory requirements, so waiting or working in parallel would waste effort. While the product owner wants to continue building features, doing so without understanding the regulatory constraints risks building more non-compliant work. The scenario's closing fact — that legal has blocked production deployment and was not previously engaged — makes cross-stakeholder collaboration the clear first step to unblock the team and establish a shared understanding of the problem.

**Why not A:** Scheduling the legal team as mandatory sprint review attendees addresses the structural process gap for future sprints but does nothing to resolve the current impediment blocking production deployment. The team's increment is already built and cannot be released—the most urgent need is to understand what specific regulatory gaps exist so the team can determine how to move forward. Making legal a standing attendee is a good corrective action but is secondary to removing the immediate blocker.

**Why not C:** Directing the team to continue Sprint 6 as planned while the product owner handles the legal issue separately risks building additional non-compliant features on top of an architecture that may need fundamental changes to meet the transparency requirements. If the AI model's approach to automated decision-making is the core compliance concern, new features built during Sprint 6 may also be non-compliant. Splitting the problem-solving from the development work wastes effort and compounds technical debt.

**Why not D:** Updating the risk register and escalating to the sponsor documents the problem but does not actively work toward resolving it. The risk register is appropriate for tracking, but the impediment is already realized—the deployment is blocked now. Escalating to the sponsor before attempting to understand the specific regulatory gaps with the legal team passes the problem upward prematurely when a working session with all parties could more quickly generate actionable solutions without requiring executive involvement.