Two key customers say they have not spoken to anyone on the Scrum Team in four months. A programme office requires every request and every question to be filed on a form it triages monthly, and the Product Owner admits she is ordering the Product Backlog from second-hand summaries. What does Scrum make the Scrum Master's job here?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 3. Managing products with agility medium
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The options
Correct Work on the intake process itself, because removing barriers between stakeholders and Scrum Teams is one of the ways a Scrum Master serves the organisation
Correct. The monthly form is exactly the kind of barrier the accountability names — it is not a background constraint the team must live with, it is the impediment.
Not correct Accept the process as an organisational reality and coach the Product Owner to write better Product Backlog items from the summaries
Wrong. It treats a removable barrier as a fixed constraint and spends the Scrum Master's effort improving the quality of second-hand information rather than restoring the first-hand kind.
Not correct Take over the intake form themselves, triaging requests weekly so they reach the Product Owner faster
Wrong, and it is a comfortable trap: it feels like service and it does speed things up. But it moves the gate rather than removing it, and it makes the Scrum Master the new filter between stakeholders and the team.
Not correct Escalate to the programme office's sponsor and ask that the Scrum Team be exempted from the reporting requirement
Wrong. A Scrum Master leads, trains and coaches the organisation in its Scrum adoption; an exemption won by escalation changes nothing anyone understands, and the goal is contact restored, not paperwork avoided.
Why
Empiricism runs on contact with reality, and stakeholders are where much of that reality lives. A process that meters that contact monthly does not slow Scrum down a little — it starves the inspection the Sprint Review is meant to perform. That is why removing barriers between stakeholders and Scrum Teams sits in the Scrum Master's service to the organisation rather than in their service to the team: the barrier is usually built outside the team, by people acting reasonably.
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 3 and space the ones you get wrong.
Practise Professional Scrum Master I
More questions on this objective
- A portfolio manager has drawn up a spreadsheet ranking every requested feature by projected revenue and tells the Scrum Team to build them in that order. The Product Owner believes two of the top five items will not be used by the customers she has spoken to. Who is accountable for maximising the value of the product? machine-checked
- It is the last afternoon of the Sprint. Three of the eight selected items are coded and demonstrable on a laptop, but they have not been through the automated regression suite the Definition of Done requires. The Product Owner suggests showing them at tomorrow's Sprint Review anyway, marked as "pending test". What does Scrum say? machine-checked
- A new Scrum Master is asked by a director where in Scrum the organisation gets to see whether the last four weeks of work were worth anything, and what should change as a result. Which event is she describing? machine-checked
- A Scrum Team spent a Sprint building a bulk-import feature. It meets the Definition of Done, it is usable, and it was released on day nine. At the Sprint Review the stakeholders explain that since the Sprint began their largest customer has moved to a different data format, and nobody will use the feature. What does Scrum say about this Sprint, and what happens now? machine-checked
- A delivery manager introduces a quarterly target: every Scrum Team must raise its velocity by fifteen per cent, and team performance reviews will cite the number. Within two Sprints the team's story point totals have risen and no more working software is reaching users than before. What is the most accurate statement about this measure? machine-checked
- A Scrum Team is agreeing what it will actually put in front of stakeholders at the end of each Sprint. Which TWO of the following statements about the Increment are true in Scrum? machine-checked