DA Governance, Compliance, and Continuous Improvement 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A highly regulated financial firm adopts DA. How should the team handle mandatory external audit requirements?
- Suspend agile practices during audit preparation periods
- Embed compliance activities as work items within the team's backlog and WoW (Correct answer)
- Create a separate waterfall team to handle all compliance deliverables
- Request an exemption from agile governance requirements
Correct answer: Embed compliance activities as work items within the team's backlog and WoW
DA encourages embedding compliance requirements directly into the team's backlog and way of working so they become part of normal delivery.
Question 2: Which metric is MOST aligned with DA's lean governance approach to measuring team performance?
- Number of hours worked per developer per sprint
- Adherence to a prescribed process template
- Outcomes delivered relative to stakeholder value (Correct answer)
- Volume of documents produced
Correct answer: Outcomes delivered relative to stakeholder value
DA lean governance focuses on outcomes and value delivery rather than activity-based or output-based metrics.
Question 3: In DA, what is 'process tailoring' in the context of governance?
- Outsourcing governance responsibilities to consultants
- Selecting and adapting practices to fit the team's context while respecting guardrails (Correct answer)
- Standardizing a single process across all teams in an organization
- Removing all governance oversight from agile teams
Correct answer: Selecting and adapting practices to fit the team's context while respecting guardrails
Process tailoring means teams choose and adapt practices from DA's toolbox to suit their unique situation within enterprise guardrails.
Question 4: Which DA principle supports continuous improvement by encouraging teams to evolve their WoW over time?
- Optimize flow (Correct answer)
- Enterprise awareness
- Be awesome
- Pragmatism
Correct answer: Optimize flow
Optimizing flow in DA includes continuously improving the team's way of working to reduce waste and increase the speed of value delivery.
Question 5: A DA program-level team discovers that three sub-teams use incompatible integration standards. Which governance action is MOST appropriate?
- Force all teams to adopt the same agile framework immediately
- Escalate to enterprise governance to establish an integration guardrail (Correct answer)
- Allow each team to continue independently to preserve autonomy
- Halt all deliveries until a consultant resolves the conflict
Correct answer: Escalate to enterprise governance to establish an integration guardrail
Program or enterprise governance in DA is responsible for setting guardrails such as integration standards when cross-team alignment is needed.
Question 6: What does DA's 'GCI' (Governance, Compliance, and Improvement) recognize about compliance activities?
- Compliance is always counter to agile values and should be minimized
- Compliance requirements are external constraints teams must address within their WoW (Correct answer)
- Compliance should be managed by a separate PMO waterfall team
- Compliance audits replace the need for retrospectives
Correct answer: Compliance requirements are external constraints teams must address within their WoW
DA acknowledges that compliance is a real business need and should be incorporated into the team's WoW rather than ignored or delegated away.
Question 7: In DA continuous improvement, the concept of 'small safe-to-fail experiments' is BEST associated with which principle?
- Delight customers
- Context counts
- Pragmatism (Correct answer)
- Enterprise awareness
Correct answer: Pragmatism
DA's pragmatism principle encourages teams to try small, low-risk experiments to discover what works in their specific context.
DA Governance, Compliance, and Continuous Improvement 3
A highly regulated financial firm adopts DA.
How should the team handle mandatory external audit requirements?