The Developers report that test environments take nine days to provision because a central platform team handles every request by ticket. The Scrum Master has a good relationship with that team's lead and could probably raise each ticket herself and chase it. What is the better expression of her accountability?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams medium
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The options
Not correct Raise and chase every environment ticket herself, so the Developers never lose a day to it
Wrong, and it is the tempting one because it works immediately and makes the Scrum Master popular. It makes her the permanent workaround for a nine-day queue, and the queue survives untouched for every other team.
Not correct Accept the delay as a constraint and coach the Developers to forecast less work each Sprint
Wrong. Lowering the forecast normalises the impediment and hides it from the organisation, which is the opposite of the transparency that would get it fixed.
Not correct Add the provisioning delay to the Sprint Backlog as an item so the Developers can fix it themselves
Wrong. The impediment sits in another department's process, well outside what the Developers can reach from inside their own Sprint; putting it on their plan makes the nine-day queue their problem to work around while the queue itself stays exactly as it is.
Correct Work with the platform team and their management on the provisioning process so the delay stops existing, while helping the Developers cope in the meantime
Correct. The accountability is causing the removal of impediments — acting on the cause so the impediment goes away, which here means changing how provisioning works rather than absorbing it personally.
Why
The Guide says causing the removal of impediments, not removing them, and the wording is doing real work. A Scrum Master who personally fixes everything becomes a dependency the team cannot outgrow, and the underlying condition — a nine-day queue, an absent approver, a missing skill — is left in place. Causing removal means finding the person or the change that ends the impediment. Personal heroics that leave the cause intact are a wrong answer even when they help this Sprint.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Master
- What it says
- Causing the removal of impediments to the Scrum Team's progress
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