Certified Agile Service Manager Continuous Service Improvement 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: In Agile CSI, what does a 'retrospective' primarily focus on?
- Planning next sprint features
- Reflecting on team process and identifying improvements (Correct answer)
- Reviewing customer satisfaction scores
- Assessing financial performance
Correct answer: Reflecting on team process and identifying improvements
Retrospectives focus on team processes, collaboration, and identifying actionable improvements for future iterations.
Question 2: Which metric best measures the effectiveness of CSI initiatives in service management?
- Number of incidents logged
- Mean Time To Recover (MTTR) trend over time (Correct answer)
- Total headcount of the service team
- Number of change requests submitted
Correct answer: Mean Time To Recover (MTTR) trend over time
Tracking MTTR trends over time directly reflects whether CSI efforts are improving the team's ability to restore services.
Question 3: A Kaizen event in Agile CSI is best described as:
- A weekly status meeting with stakeholders
- A focused, short-duration improvement burst targeting a specific problem (Correct answer)
- A quarterly business review session
- A certification audit for service processes
Correct answer: A focused, short-duration improvement burst targeting a specific problem
Kaizen events are concentrated improvement workshops where a team addresses a specific problem area in a short, intensive effort.
Question 4: What is the role of 'psychological safety' in continuous service improvement teams?
- It ensures physical safety of IT infrastructure
- It allows team members to raise concerns and experiment without fear of blame (Correct answer)
- It refers to cybersecurity protocols in service delivery
- It mandates anonymous feedback submission only
Correct answer: It allows team members to raise concerns and experiment without fear of blame
Psychological safety enables honest dialogue, experimentation, and learning from failures — all critical for sustained improvement.
Question 5: When applying the PDCA cycle in an Agile context, which phase aligns most closely with a sprint review?
- Plan
- Do
- Check (Correct answer)
- Act
Correct answer: Check
The Check phase involves evaluating results against expectations, which mirrors what happens during a sprint review when outcomes are assessed.
Question 6: Which Agile practice helps teams maintain a continuous improvement backlog?
- Daily standup only
- Maintaining a dedicated 'improvement backlog' or 'kaizen backlog' (Correct answer)
- Publishing a monthly newsletter
- Conducting annual performance reviews
Correct answer: Maintaining a dedicated 'improvement backlog' or 'kaizen backlog'
An improvement backlog captures identified improvement opportunities and ensures they are prioritized and addressed systematically.
Question 7: A service team notices its deployment frequency has decreased over three sprints. According to CSI principles, the FIRST step should be:
- Immediately hire more developers
- Measure and analyze the root cause before taking action (Correct answer)
- Switch to a different Agile framework
- Escalate to senior management for a budget increase
Correct answer: Measure and analyze the root cause before taking action
CSI requires data-driven understanding of root causes before implementing solutions to avoid fixing the wrong problem.
Certified Agile Service Manager Continuous Service Improvement 2
In Agile CSI, what does a 'retrospective' primarily focus on?