Evolving the Agile Organization

PSM-I · 12 questions

• At a consumer home-robot company, the Scrum Master learns that a company-wide change-freeze policy set by IT operations is blocking the firmware team from shipping a critical safety patch outside of quarterly release windows, and no one on the Scrum Team has the authority to change the policy. What should the Scrum Master do?
• A consumer home-robot company introduced Scrum for its firmware group, but functional managers who predate Scrum still conduct performance reviews and still occasionally tell individual Developers which task to pick up next. The Scrum Master wants to work with these managers rather than against them. What is the best approach?
• Executives at a home-robot company ask the Scrum Masters to report how "agile" the organization has become now that every team runs Daily Scrums and uses a Sprint Board. Which measure would best reflect actual organizational agility rather than practice adoption?
• A home-robot company's single firmware Scrum Team has grown too large, so leadership splits it into two Scrum Teams that both build firmware for the same companion-app-connected robot. According to the Scrum Guide's view of multiple teams working on one product, how should the two teams be set up?
• A big-box retailer sets a fixed feature-complete date eight months out for a new home-robot model, and company leadership hands that fixed date, fixed scope, and fixed quality bar down to the Scrum Team as non-negotiable. The Scrum Master recognizes this as an organizational impediment. What is the best response?
• Leadership at a home-robot company announces a "digital transformation" initiative to redesign the entire org chart around agile teams in a single reorganization completed before any team starts sprinting under the new structure. A Scrum Master is asked for input on this approach. What should the Scrum Master recommend?
• At a home-robot company, hardware, firmware, app, and cloud work are each owned by separate functional departments that hand work to one another in sequence, so no single Scrum Team can produce a done, working Increment within one Sprint without waiting on another department. Who should address this, and how?
• A home-robot company's leadership ranks its several Scrum Teams by which one runs its Sprint events exactly as prescribed, with perfect attendance and no events skipped, and calls the top-ranked team "most agile." What is the best correction to this way of measuring agility?
• A customer-support organization that predates Scrum starts adding urgent field-failure reports directly to the firmware Scrum Team's Sprint Backlog whenever a robot malfunctions, without involving anyone else. What should the Scrum Master do to address this across the organization?
• As a home-robot company grows from one Scrum Team to four Scrum Teams (app, firmware, cloud, and a hardware-integration team) all contributing to the same robot, a leader asks whether Scrum requires appointing four separate, dedicated Scrum Masters, one per team. What does the Scrum Guide actually say about the Scrum Master role at this scale?
• A home-robot company's bonus structure rewards managers for hitting the retail launch date regardless of the state of the Increment, and the firmware team starts feeling pressure to report progress more favorably than it actually is to avoid conflict with leadership. What should the Scrum Master do about this?
• A home-robot company's leadership decides how much investment each of next quarter's product lines gets based on which team's engineers appear busiest, rather than on what value each team has actually delivered. A Scrum Master is asked to weigh in on this funding process. What should the Scrum Master encourage?