A robotics company's Scrum Master spends most of their time updating a shared spreadsheet of task statuses and reminding individual Developers to update their rows, rather than attending Scrum events or coaching the team. A peer describes this as 'basically being the project's status admin.' What does this indicate about how the Scrum Master accountability is being applied?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
There's a real difference between making work transparent and becoming the person who nags everyone to update a spreadsheet. The Scrum Master's actual job lives in coaching, facilitating, and clearing real obstacles — not administering a tracker that quietly turns self-managing Developers into people reporting status to someone else.
Full Explanation
The Scrum Master accountability, per the 2020 Scrum Guide, is establishing Scrum and serving the Scrum Team's effectiveness by coaching self-management and cross-functionality, helping remove impediments, and supporting the Product Owner and organization — not administering status trackers. Spending the bulk of one's time chasing spreadsheet updates substitutes a project-administration function for that coaching and impediment-removal work, and it also risks making the Developers accountable to a tracker and its owner rather than self-managing their own transparency. Calling it reasonable because 'someone needs visibility' misses that transparency in Scrum is meant to emerge from the artifacts and events themselves — the Sprint Backlog, the Daily Scrum — not from a side-channel spreadsheet a Scrum Master personally maintains. Suggesting the spreadsheet could replace the Daily Scrum entirely is a deeper problem: the Daily Scrum is a Developers-run inspect-and-adapt conversation, and no artifact substitutes for that real-time replanning. Framing the behavior as legitimate 'because it keeps the Sprint Backlog visible' stretches the Scrum Master's actual accountability to cover any adjacent administrative task. A telling check: if the Scrum Master stopped updating the spreadsheet tomorrow, would the team's self-management and transparency hold up on their own? If not, the wrong thing has been propping it up.