A newly appointed Scrum Master is told by his head of engineering that his mandate is to "enforce the process" and to escalate the names of people who do not follow it. How should he understand his accountability?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams easy
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The options
Correct He is accountable for establishing Scrum by helping everyone understand Scrum theory and practice, inside the team and in the organisation
Correct. Establishing Scrum is done through understanding — a true leader who serves — and that is a different mechanism from enforcement, with different results.
Not correct He is accountable for compliance, and escalation is the tool the Guide gives him for it
Wrong. The Guide gives the Scrum Master no disciplinary tool at all; a team that follows Scrum because it is policed is not being transparent about anything.
Not correct He is accountable only for the events, so anything outside an event is not his concern
Wrong, and it is a tidy misreading. Ensuring the events happen is one bullet in a much longer list that includes coaching, impediments and the organisation itself.
Not correct He is accountable for whatever his head of engineering defines, since the organisation employs him
Wrong. The organisation decides many things about the role's context, but it does not get to redefine an accountability the framework states — and part of his job is teaching it that.
Why
Servant leadership is not a personality note in the Guide, it is the mechanism. Enforcement produces the appearance of Scrum — attended events, tidy boards — while the honesty that makes empiricism work quietly disappears, because nobody reports a problem to someone who escalates names. A Scrum Master establishes Scrum by making people understand why each part exists, and a Scrum Master's first organisational student is often his own manager.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Master
- What it says
- The Scrum Master is accountable for establishing Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide.
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