Risk Management Professional (PMI-RMP)

Correct: In Scrum, the Scrum Master is responsible for promoting and supporting Scrum by helping everyone understand Scrum theory, practices, rules, and values. When a team lacks initiative due to perceived boundaries or fear, the Scrum Master must coach the team on the Scrum Values—specifically Courage and Openness. Furthermore, as a servant-leader, the Scrum Master must work with the broader organization (stakeholders and vendor management) to remove the ‘contractual fear’ that prevents the outsourced members from acting as a self-organizing unit.

Incorrect: Requiring innovation items in the backlog treats proactivity as a mechanical task rather than a cultural mindset and may not address the root cause of the silence. Reducing detail in User Stories as a tactic to force communication can lead to frustration and poor quality if the underlying lack of safety is not addressed. Performance-based incentives for specific behaviors often lead to ‘gaming the system’ and can undermine the intrinsic motivation and collaboration essential to a Scrum Team.

Takeaway: The Scrum Master fosters proactivity by coaching the team on Scrum Values and removing organizational barriers that hinder self-organization.

Correct: The Scrum Master’s role in mediation is rooted in the Scrum Values. By reinforcing respect and openness, the Scrum Master creates a psychologically safe environment where team members can disagree on technical grounds without it becoming a personal conflict. This transparency is essential for the empirical process of inspection and adaptation, allowing the team to learn from the failed experiment rather than assigning blame.

Incorrect: Involving the Product Owner to settle technical disputes undermines the Development Team’s self-management and technical accountability. Escalating to a functional manager introduces external command-and-control, which weakens the team’s ability to resolve internal conflicts. Assigning decision-making power solely to a senior member creates a hierarchy that stifles the collective intelligence and cross-functionality of the Scrum Team.

Takeaway: Effective mediation in Scrum relies on fostering a culture of psychological safety through the lived application of Scrum Values, enabling the team to self-manage through conflict.

Correct: The Scrum Master is a servant-leader who serves the Product Owner by helping find techniques for effective Product Backlog management and serves the Scrum Team by removing impediments. A conflict of interest involving administrative power (performance appraisals) prevents the team from being truly self-managing and creates a ‘command and control’ environment that undermines Scrum values like Openness and Courage. By relinquishing this power and moving compliance needs into the transparent Product Backlog, the Scrum Master upholds the framework’s integrity and ensures the Product Owner remains the sole person responsible for prioritization.

Incorrect: Creating a secondary backlog violates the principle of transparency and the requirement for a single Product Backlog. Using the Definition of Done as a tool for the Scrum Master to enforce specific tasks misinterprets the artifact’s purpose and the Scrum Master’s role as a coach rather than a manager. Setting a percentage-based compromise fails to address the underlying conflict of interest and continues to allow the Scrum Master to overstep their role by interfering with the Product Owner’s accountability for prioritization.

Takeaway: Advocating for Agile requires removing organizational impediments—such as conflicting administrative roles—that undermine servant leadership and the transparency of the Product Backlog.

Correct: Silent brainstorming (often called brainwriting) allows individuals to generate ideas independently without being influenced or intimidated by dominant personalities or seniority. Following this with a structured sharing process like round-robin ensures that every team member has an equal opportunity to contribute. This approach aligns with the Scrum values of Openness and Respect, and supports the empirical pillar of Transparency by ensuring the full range of team knowledge is inspected.

Incorrect: Assigning a dominant person as a scribe may capture ideas but does not inherently prevent them from influencing the conversation or ensure others feel safe to contribute. Increasing the timebox does not address the underlying power dynamic or the lack of psychological safety that prevents junior staff from speaking up. Requiring pre-submission of ideas to the Product Owner creates a bottleneck, reduces the collaborative synergy of the team, and may lead to filtering that excludes innovative solutions before the team can discuss them.

Takeaway: Effective facilitation in Scrum requires techniques that neutralize power imbalances and promote psychological safety to ensure all team members contribute to solution generation.

Correct: The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring that Scrum events are productive and kept within their timeboxes. The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute event for the Developers to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint Backlog. By coaching the team to focus on these objectives and move detailed technical discussions to separate breakout sessions (often called the ‘after-party’), the Scrum Master maintains the discipline of the framework while ensuring technical issues are still addressed.

Incorrect: Extending the timebox to 45 minutes violates the core Scrum framework rules which mandate a 15-minute limit for the Daily Scrum regardless of project complexity. Using written updates read by the Scrum Master removes the collaborative, self-managing nature of the event and turns it into a status report. The Product Owner is not responsible for facilitating the Daily Scrum; it is an event for the Developers to manage their own work.

Takeaway: The Scrum Master ensures the Daily Scrum remains a focused 15-minute synchronization event by coaching the team to move detailed technical discussions outside the timebox.

Correct: The Scrum Guide defines the Scrum Master’s service to the organization as including leading, training, and coaching the organization in its Scrum adoption, and helping stakeholders and employees understand and enact an empirical approach for complex work. By focusing on these areas, the Scrum Master addresses the root cause of the misunderstanding among department heads and ensures the organization supports the Scrum framework effectively rather than just acting as a traditional project reporter.

Incorrect: Increasing the frequency of the Daily Scrum is a common misconception that more meetings solve communication issues, but it violates the standard Scrum framework and does not address the organizational coaching need. Assigning tasks to Developers contradicts the principle of self-management, where the team decides how to do the work. While the Product Owner manages stakeholder expectations regarding the Product Backlog, the Scrum Master is specifically responsible for coaching the organization on how to interact with the Scrum Team and understand empiricism, so offloading all communication is not the correct solution.

Takeaway: The Scrum Master serves the organization by coaching stakeholders on empirical work and facilitating the removal of barriers between the Scrum Team and the wider organization.

Correct: In Scrum, accountability is a collective responsibility of the Scrum Team. By focusing on the Sprint Goal and the Scrum value of commitment, the team learns that success is measured by the delivery of the increment, not the completion of individual tasks. This encourages members to collaborate and support one another to meet the shared objective, which is the hallmark of a self-managing team.

Incorrect: Individual performance metrics encourage local optimization and silos rather than teamwork. Assigning tasks to individuals contradicts the principle of self-management and removes the team’s autonomy to decide how to best accomplish the work. Detailed hourly tracking turns the Daily Scrum into a status meeting and micromanagement tool, which erodes trust and discourages the very ownership the Scrum Master is trying to build.

Takeaway: Collective accountability is fostered by aligning the team around a shared Sprint Goal rather than individual task performance or external assignments.

Correct: The Sprint Review is the primary Scrum event intended for collaboration between the Scrum Team and stakeholders. By inspecting the Increment together and discussing the Product Backlog, the team ensures transparency and allows stakeholders to provide input that can be immediately incorporated into future planning, thereby reducing the risk of late-stage rework and alignment issues.

Incorrect: Inviting stakeholders to the Daily Scrum is incorrect because that event is specifically for the Developers to manage their own progress toward the Sprint Goal; external interference can undermine self-management. Requiring status reports for preliminary approval introduces a waterfall-style gate that slows down the iterative process and shifts accountability away from the Product Owner. Creating separate Compliance Sprints is an anti-pattern that suggests quality and compliance are not part of the regular Definition of Done, leading to a buildup of risk and technical debt.

Takeaway: Effective stakeholder collaboration in Scrum is achieved through transparency and inspection during the Sprint Review, ensuring the Product Backlog is continuously adapted to meet business and regulatory needs.

Correct: The Scrum Master is responsible for promoting and supporting Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide. This involves helping everyone understand Scrum theory, practices, rules, and values. When a team avoids difficult conversations, they are failing to uphold the values of courage and openness, which are essential for transparency. Without transparency, the empirical pillars of inspection and adaptation are flawed. Coaching the team to embrace these values is the most effective way to address the risk of superficial agility and ensure the team can self-manage effectively.

Incorrect: Standardized checklists for identifying flaws often lead to mechanical compliance rather than genuine improvement and do not address the underlying cultural issue of avoidance. Inviting functional managers to the Retrospective typically reduces psychological safety and discourages the team from being honest about their failures, which is counterproductive to the purpose of the event. Extending the duration of the event focuses on the mechanics of the meeting rather than the quality of the interaction and the commitment to the Scrum values, which is the root cause of the issue.

Takeaway: A Scrum Master must coach the team on Scrum values to ensure that the empirical process of inspection and adaptation is based on genuine transparency.

Correct: The Scrum Master serves the organization in several ways, including leading, training, and coaching the organization in its Scrum adoption and causing change that increases the productivity of the Scrum Team. By actively working to remove barriers between stakeholders and the Scrum Team, the Scrum Master fulfills their role as a change agent and champion of the agile transformation, ensuring that the empirical process can function effectively at an organizational level.

Incorrect: Lowering the priority of items based solely on external friction avoids the underlying organizational issue and may result in the most valuable work being ignored. Adjusting the Definition of Done to exclude external dependencies reduces transparency and quality, creating hidden risks and technical debt. Delegating dependency management to a PMO reinforces traditional silos and contradicts the Scrum principle of self-management and the Scrum Master’s responsibility to facilitate organizational change.

Takeaway: A Scrum Master champions agile transformation by coaching the broader organization to remove systemic impediments that hinder the team’s ability to deliver a ‘Done’ increment.