Test Online Free Scrum PAL-EBM Exam Questions and Answers
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An organization in USA wants to develop a new product. The product will cater to users all over the world. The organization in USA has hired you to lead the initiative. The product's development team has no ideas on what the product should be or what the customers need.
Which of the following would help you decide on what should be done? (Choose the best answer)
Answer: Explanation:
When the team has doubts about what a customer wants, hypothesis driven development is the key.
What Is Hypothesis-Driven Development?
Question 17Selectable Answer
Which measure best reflects an organization’s ability to be responsive?
Answer: Explanation:
Were you looking for Time to market? Well that's a great start. Remember it's a Key Value Area. Within KVA there are many KVM's. (Key value areas). Time to pivot is a key value measure under time to market.
Also refer to the below summary table. This summary table will help you memorize key points about the KVA and KVM. Please save the image and print it as needed.
By definition time to Pivot is a measure of true business agility that presents the elapsed time between when an organization receives feedback or new information and when it responds to that feedback; for example, the time between when it finds out that a competitor has delivered a new market-winning feature to when the organization responds with matching or exceeding new capabilities that measurably improve customer experience.
Question 18Selectable Answer
An organization has a product release cycle which is shorter than any of it competitors. However, measures in customer satisfaction still remain low as most of your releases only contain only minor updates or fixes to previously released features.
In order to boost your product's competitiveness, which two KVAs should you evaluate? (Choose the best two answers)
Answer: Explanation:
The question clearly states that the organization has a product release cycle which is shorter than any of it competitors. Looking at this statement, we know that the organization does not have to worry about the time to market.
The organization is focused on is focused on minor updates or fixes and is aware of the current value it provides . In order to improve, it needs to be more focused on delivering the unrealized value and reducing non-value-added work (by analyzing the ability to innovate).
Question 19Selectable Answer
Should an organization allocate product funding all at one time, during the annual financial planning?
Answer: Explanation:
Traditional funding models often impede organizations from innovating, because they make projections based on inadequate information to form unrealistic business cases that can’t learn from experience. Making assumptions during annual financial planning and funding heavily based on it would limit the ability to adapt when new opportunities emerge. Rather than funding small increments of functionality and validating hypotheses based on empirical data, the traditional models make big bets based on hunches and opinions, penalize changes, and then wonder why results are poor.
Funding product or service development in a series of experiments lets organizations test new ideas quickly, allowing the ideas that won’t work to be identified quickly. This lets an organization focus on the ideas that are more likely to produce better results. Betting only a small amount minimizes the amount of effort you’ve “wasted” going down the wrong path when an idea proves to be unworkable.
Question 20Selectable Answer
Application A is generating the most money and profit for a company with a very happy customer base (high Current Value) and low Unrealized Value. Application B is fairly new and has low Current Value but has high Unrealized Value. The Product Owners of both apps are requesting significantly more funding to add improvements to their products.
How should this company respond?
Answer: Explanation:
Customers are happy with Application A as it is; adding more features may actually decrease customer satisfaction. The best time to invest in new products is when the CV is low (Product is new) however the UV is high. (High market potential). In this example it would be Application B.
The consideration of both CV and UV provides organizations with a way to balance present and possible future benefits. Strategic Goals are formed from some satisfaction gap and an opportunity for an organization to decrease UV by increasing CV.
Example: A product may have low CV, because it is an early version being used to test the market, but very high UV, indicating that there is great market potential. Investing in the product to try to boost CV is probably warranted, given the potential returns, even though the product is not currently producing high CV.
Conversely, a product with very high CV, large market share, no near competitors, and very satisfied customers may not warrant much new investment; this is the classic cash cow product that is very profitable but nearing the end of its product investment cycle with low UV.
Question 21Selectable Answer
The effectiveness of an organization to deliver new capabilities that might better meet customer needs can be analyzed by looking at: (Choose the best answer)
Answer: Explanation:
Ability to Innovate expresses the ability of a organization to deliver new capabilities that might better meet customer needs. The goal of looking at the A2I is to maximize the organization’s ability to deliver new capabilities and innovative solutions.
Organizations should continually re-evaluate their A2I by asking:
Question 22Selectable Answer
What are the key characteristics of an effective strategic goal? (Choose all that apply)
Answer: Explanation:
The Strategic Goal is usually focused on achieving a highly desirable but unrealized outcome for a specific group of people that results in improved happiness, safety, security, or well-being of the recipients of some product or service.
When setting goals, organizations must define specific measures that will indicate that the goal is achieved. In other words it should be measurable. Goals, measures, and experiments should be made transparent in order to encourage organizational alignment.
Question 23Selectable Answer
Once a Strategic Goal is set, the entire organization works towards it. It should not be changed throughout the release once it is set. Goals are only set (and changed) during the time of annual strategic planning.
Answer: Explanation:
Goals need to be continuously ordered and re-evaluated. As the goals evolve, based on new information, organizations need to re-evaluate their relative importance. Organizations should keep a Goal Backlog and continually refine it by identifying new goals, shifting the relative importance of existing goals, and removing goals that are no longer relevant.
Question 24Selectable Answer
Creating a culture of continuous improvement puts organizations on the path to competitive advantage.
Answer: Explanation:
A continuous improvement culture is a shared value system that promotes the belief that what is good enough today is not good enough for tomorrow.
Cultures do not change overnight. It takes time, patience, strong communication skills, and most importantly, trust between managers and their teams.
A continuous improvement culture starts with a strong Lean leadership team that actively seeks out opportunities to: reduce waste, improve flow through the value stream, and increase the focus on the customer.
Developing a continuous improvement culture is fundamental to a company’s long-term success. With a shared mindset of innovation and the right system of behaviors to drive it, organizations experience consistent growth that competitors can’t match. Product development, customer service, and profitability almost take care of themselves when a business puts continual improvement at its core.
Some of the benefits of building a continuous improvement culture include;
Question 25Selectable Answer
Working on fewer things at a time, eliminating multi-tasking, helps organizations focus so that they finish everything faster than they would if they took on more work.
Answer: Explanation:
Organizations generally have more ideas than they have capacity to pursue.
When the organization tries to work on more ideas than it has capacity, they force teams to multi-task, which causes the teams to lose focus, and become less effective:
1) Each initiative takes longer to deliver because teams lose effectiveness when they switch contexts between different initiatives.
2) Delaying value realization or feedback on value delivered deprives the organization of information it needs to make course-correcting decisions
3) Delaying feedback causes organizations to waste time and money on things that later prove to be valueless once they get feedback.
Remember this includes running one experiment on the product at a time is the best way to understand how the results affect your desired outcomes.
Question 26Selectable Answer
A company has a product which belongs to the healthcare industry. In 2020, the compliance and regulations standards in this industry rapidly changed resulting into product features changes. The company wants to analyze how fast it can develop and release these features to their existing clients?
Which KVA should the company analyze?
Answer: Explanation:
Time-to-Market (T2M) expresses the organization’s ability to quickly deliver new capabilities, services, or products. The goal of looking at Time-to-Market is to minimize the amount of time it takes for the organization to deliver value. Without actively managing Time-to-Market, the ability to sustainably deliver value in the future is unknown.
Questions that organizations need to continually re-evaluate for time to market are:
Question 27Selectable Answer
Unrealized Value is a gap which can be measured by looking at the difference between: (Select one)
Answer: Explanation:
Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is known. Scrum employs an iterative, incremental approach to optimize predictability and control risk. The Strategic Goal is usually focused on achieving a highly desirable but unrealized outcome for a specific group of people that results in improved happiness, safety, security, or well-being of the recipients of some product or service. In EBM, we refer to this as Unrealized Value, which is the satisfaction gap between a beneficiary’s desired outcome and their current experience. As the guide states:
When customers, users, or clients experience a gap between their current experience and the experience that they would like to have, the difference between the two represents an opportunity; this opportunity is measured by Unrealized Value.
Question 28Selectable Answer
A Product owner is seeing certain reports in which he sees negative value for the outcomes. The value of the outcomes can be negative due to: (Choose all that apply)
Answer: Explanation:
Outcomes are desirable things that a customer or user of a product experiences. They represent some new or improved capability that the customer or user was not able to achieve before. Examples include being able to travel to a destination faster than before, or being able to earn or save more money than before. Outcomes can also be negative, as in the case where the value a customer or user experiences declines from previous experiences, for example when a service they previously relied upon is no longer available.
Defects, downtimes, slowness all create negative value, which the customer is negatively impacted. The negative value could impact the product's quality and reduce the firm's profit.
Question 29Selectable Answer
Which two Key Value Areas are most affected if a team is switching tasks or is interrupted? (Choose two best answers)
Answer: Explanation:
Interruptions and task switching cause a team to lose focus, which results in less value being produced per interval of time, which is another way of looking at their Ability to Innovate. It could potentially affect Time to Market because interruptions cause loss of focus which can lead to delay.
A variety of things can impede a team from being able to deliver new capabilities and value (thus reducing A2I):
Question 30Selectable Answer
A set of executives are in a meeting discussing different market opportunities and where to invest. They want to help the organization make better investment decisions (better than the ones made in the past).
What can these executives do to help their organization make effective portfolio investment decisions? (Choose the best answer)
Answer: Explanation:
Linking investments to goals, measuring progress against these goals, and then inspecting and adapting both goals and investments, based on feedback, is the key to true business agility, and provides important benefits:
• Guiding investments based on goals and letting teams propose experiments that seek toward those goals provides a better way to align work with business objectives by making goal pursuit the singular focus of the organization.
• Frequently re-evaluating funding based on best available evidence gives organizations a better way to balance competing demands, to more effectively manage risk, and to redirect their teams to go after better opportunities when they present themselves.
• Letting teams propose experiments and limiting their work to their available capacity leverages bottom-up intelligence and improves flow by reducing context-switching and team-level multi-tasking.
Note: Working together, executives responsible for guiding investments, and the teams who make business proposals (to progress towards the goal), evaluate where the organization should “place its bets”.
