A finance director insists on a signed twelve-month plan naming every feature and its delivery month before he will release next year's budget, saying he cannot fund work that has no plan. The Product Owner is ready to invent the dates to get the money. What is the Scrum Master's best course?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams hard
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 Help the Product Owner produce the twelve-month feature list, then revise it quietly each quarter
Wrong, and it is what most teams actually do. A plan everyone privately knows is fiction destroys the transparency that decisions are supposed to rest on, and the director keeps funding on the basis of it.
Correct Coach the director toward an empirical approach — a Product Goal, funding a team rather than a feature list, and inspecting real Increments to steer the year
Correct. Helping employees and stakeholders understand and enact an empirical approach for complex work is a named organisational service, and the director's real need — confidence in his money — is better met by evidence than by dates.
Not correct Refuse to engage with budgeting, since forecasting is outside the Scrum framework
Wrong. The Guide notes that forecasting practices are useful; what it warns is that they do not replace empiricism. Abandoning the conversation leaves the Product Owner to sign the fiction alone.
Not correct Have the Developers estimate all twelve months of work so at least the dates are defensible
Wrong, and it is the diligent-looking option. Long-range estimates of unstarted work in a complex domain are still a projection of the unknown; more effort does not make them knowledge.
Why
In a complex environment only what has already happened may be used for forward-looking decisions, so the honest response to a demand for certainty is a different mechanism for confidence, not a better-dressed guess. That conversation happens outside the team, with people who control money and governance, which is why the Guide names it as service to the organisation. Notice the pattern: the Scrum Master neither complies nor refuses; he teaches.
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