DAC Team Dynamics & Continuous Improvement 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A DA Coach is helping a distributed team struggling with collaboration. Which technique most directly addresses asynchronous communication challenges?
- Require all team members to overlap for at least 4 hours daily
- Establish a shared team wiki with lightweight async update protocols (Correct answer)
- Move the entire team to the same time zone
- Reduce team size to 3 members
Correct answer: Establish a shared team wiki with lightweight async update protocols
A shared wiki with async update protocols allows distributed team members to stay aligned without requiring synchronous availability.
Question 2: In Disciplined Agile, the 'Improve continuously' principle is best demonstrated by which team behavior?
- Waiting until the project ends to conduct a lessons-learned session
- Running an experiment each iteration to test one process improvement hypothesis (Correct answer)
- Adopting a new framework every quarter
- Outsourcing retrospectives to an external consultant
Correct answer: Running an experiment each iteration to test one process improvement hypothesis
Running small, safe-to-fail experiments each iteration embodies evidence-based continuous improvement at the team level.
Question 3: When a high-performing DA team experiences sudden member turnover, which action should the coach prioritize FIRST?
- Immediately hire contractors to fill the skill gap
- Re-establish psychological safety and revisit working agreements with the reconstituted team (Correct answer)
- Extend the next iteration to allow adjustment time
- Escalate to senior management for a team restructure
Correct answer: Re-establish psychological safety and revisit working agreements with the reconstituted team
Turnover resets team dynamics; re-establishing psychological safety and shared agreements accelerates the re-forming process.
Question 4: Which DA practice helps teams identify and eliminate the BIGGEST source of waste in their process first?
- Value stream mapping of the current workflow (Correct answer)
- Increasing iteration length
- Adding more daily standups
- Implementing SAFe PI Planning
Correct answer: Value stream mapping of the current workflow
Value stream mapping visualizes the entire workflow, making the largest waste or bottleneck immediately visible for targeted improvement.
Question 5: A team member consistently dominates retrospectives, silencing quieter members. As a DA Coach, what is the BEST facilitation technique?
- Exclude the dominant member from retrospectives
- Use silent writing or dot-voting before discussion to surface all voices equally (Correct answer)
- Ask the product owner to moderate instead
- Switch to written-only retrospectives permanently
Correct answer: Use silent writing or dot-voting before discussion to surface all voices equally
Silent writing or dot-voting before open discussion ensures all team members can contribute ideas without being overshadowed by louder voices.
Question 6: In DA, 'enterprise awareness' in the context of team dynamics means teams should:
- Only focus on their own sprint goals and ignore other teams
- Understand how their work and decisions impact other teams and the broader organization (Correct answer)
- Report daily status to enterprise leadership
- Follow enterprise-mandated processes without tailoring
Correct answer: Understand how their work and decisions impact other teams and the broader organization
Enterprise awareness means teams recognize their place in the larger organizational system and consider cross-team dependencies and impacts.
Question 7: Which of the following best describes the role of a DA Coach when a team is in the 'Storming' phase?
- Intervene immediately to resolve all conflicts on behalf of the team
- Step back entirely to let the team self-organize without any guidance
- Coach the team to surface conflicts constructively and develop conflict-resolution skills (Correct answer)
- Replace underperforming team members to end the storming phase faster
Correct answer: Coach the team to surface conflicts constructively and develop conflict-resolution skills
A DA Coach helps teams navigate Storming by developing their own conflict-resolution capabilities rather than resolving conflicts for them.
DAC Team Dynamics & Continuous Improvement 3
A DA Coach is helping a distributed team struggling with collaboration.
Which technique most directly addresses asynchronous communication challenges?