Three days into the Sprint, two Developers are idle while a third is overloaded. A department head tells the Scrum Master to assign the outstanding work himself, arguing that the team is clearly not capable of organising itself yet. What should the Scrum Master do?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams medium
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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 Assign the work this Sprint and hand self-management back once the team is more mature
Wrong, and it is the most convincing distractor on the page because it sounds like a phased, responsible approach. A team that is organised from outside never gets the practice that makes it capable, so the temporary measure becomes the permanent one.
Correct Raise the imbalance with the Developers and coach them to inspect and re-plan the work themselves, keeping the decision theirs
Correct. The Developers internally decide who does what, when and how, and they adapt their own plan — at the Daily Scrum and at any other point in the day they see the need; the Scrum Master coaches, he does not allocate.
Not correct Ask the Product Owner to allocate the remaining items, since he owns the backlog
Wrong. The Product Owner owns what is worth doing and in what order, never who does it — a real Scrum accountability applied to the wrong decision.
Not correct Rebalance the Sprint Backlog himself and tell the Developers afterwards so the Sprint Goal is not at risk
Wrong. The Sprint Backlog is a plan by and for the Developers; editing it on their behalf takes away both the plan and the reason to inspect it.
Why
The classic PSM I trap is a real Scrum outcome — balanced work, a protected Sprint Goal — reached by the wrong person. Self-management is not a reward for maturity, it is the mechanism that produces maturity, so removing it to fix a bad week guarantees the same bad week later. Read every option for who is deciding: if the answer has the Scrum Master or a manager allocating work inside the Sprint, it is wrong however sensible the outcome.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Team
- What it says
- They are also self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how.
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