A programme office has instructed stakeholders that all questions for the Scrum Team must go through a delivery liaison, who collects them and forwards a weekly summary. Two Sprints later the Developers say they no longer understand who they are building for. What should the Scrum Master do about the arrangement?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams medium
Machine-checked — no person has signed for it. This question was read against the source cited below by an automated pass, which found no contradiction. That is a weaker claim than it sounds: the same kind of process wrote the question, so it can confirm its own mistake.
Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.
The options
Not correct Leave it in place but ask the liaison to forward questions daily rather than weekly
Wrong. Speeding up a relay does not restore the conversation; the Developers still never hear a stakeholder's own words or ask their own follow-up question.
Not correct Ask the Product Owner to answer every stakeholder question personally so the liaison becomes unnecessary
Wrong, and it is a near miss — the Product Owner does represent stakeholder needs in the Product Backlog, but making one person the sole channel rebuilds the same barrier with a different name.
Correct Work with the programme office to remove the barrier, so stakeholders and the Scrum Team talk to each other directly
Correct. Removing barriers between stakeholders and Scrum Teams is one of the named ways a Scrum Master serves the organisation, and this arrangement is exactly such a barrier.
Not correct Record the loss of contact as an impediment in the Sprint Retrospective and move on
Wrong. Naming it in a Retrospective is a reasonable start, but the accountability does not end at documenting an impediment the team cannot remove by itself.
Why
Empiricism needs the people who receive the work and the people doing it to be in contact — that is what makes the Increment inspectable by the people whose opinion decides its value. Layers of relay are usually installed for good reasons, protecting the team's focus or a manager's overview, and they quietly starve the team of the information Scrum runs on. Serving the organisation means going to whoever built the layer and taking it out, not routing around it.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Master
- What it says
- Removing barriers between stakeholders and Scrum Teams.
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