A Scrum Master has one team that is running well. The head of marketing asks her to spend a morning a week explaining Scrum to her department, because marketing keeps sending requests straight to individual Developers. The Scrum Master's manager says her job is the team and she should decline. Who is right, and why?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams medium
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The options
Not correct The manager, because a Scrum Master's accountability stops at the boundary of the Scrum Team
Wrong, and it is the most plausible-sounding answer because it matches how most organisations write the job description. The Guide places the organisation alongside the team as something the Scrum Master serves, not as an optional extra once the team is finished.
Correct The head of marketing, because a Scrum Master serves the wider organisation as well as the Scrum Team
Correct. Helping employees and stakeholders understand and enact an empirical approach for complex work is one of the four named ways the Scrum Master serves the organisation, and a department sending work straight to individual Developers is exactly such a stakeholder.
Not correct The manager, because only the Product Owner may talk to people outside the Scrum Team
Wrong. Nothing in Scrum makes the Product Owner a gatekeeper on conversation; the Product Owner owns the ordering of the Product Backlog, which is a different thing entirely.
Not correct Neither — the Scrum Master should run the sessions only if the Developers vote to release her for the morning
Wrong. The Developers self-manage their own work; they are not an approval body for how the Scrum Master discharges her own accountability.
Why
Half of the Scrum Master's job description in the Guide points outward — leading and training the organisation in its Scrum adoption, helping employees and stakeholders understand an empirical approach, removing barriers between stakeholders and Scrum Teams. A Scrum Master who only ever works inside the team leaves the conditions that produce the team's impediments untouched. The rule to carry into the exam: when an option confines the Scrum Master to the team, suspect it.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Master
- What it says
- Helping employees and stakeholders understand and enact an empirical approach for complex work
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 2 and space the ones you get wrong.
Practise Professional Scrum Master I
More questions on this objective
- A team lead who sits outside the Scrum Team has taken to opening the board every Monday and assigning each Sprint Backlog item to a named Developer for the week. The Developers say the assignments rarely match who is best placed to pick the work up. Who decides which Developer works on which item? machine-checked
- On day four of a two-week Sprint, a department head tells one of the five Developers to spend the rest of the week on a customer escalation for another product. The Sprint Goal depends on that Developer's work. What should the Scrum Master do? machine-checked
- During Sprint Planning, a solution architect who is not on the Scrum Team hands the Developers a task breakdown for each selected Product Backlog item and asks them to follow it. The Developers had planned to decompose the work differently. What does Scrum say about this? machine-checked
- A Scrum Team is reworking its Daily Scrum. They are tired of three questions each and want to try walking the board right to left instead, and they also want to know how much else about the event they are free to change. Which two of the following are genuinely theirs to decide? (Choose two.) machine-checked
- A Scrum Team has stopped keeping its Sprint Backlog current, and when a stakeholder asks how the Sprint is going the Developers reply that they are self-managing and will show the result at the Sprint Review. Two Sprints in a row have then missed the Sprint Goal. What is wrong here? machine-checked
- With three days of the Sprint left, the Developers agree among themselves to skip the security review and the automated regression suite, both of which are in the Definition of Done, so that two more items can be finished. They argue that as a self-managing team it is their call. Is it? machine-checked