A hardware certification lab tells the Developers a required safety test can only run once every two weeks due to lab scheduling, which conflicts with the company's weekly Sprint cadence. This is a constraint outside the Scrum Team's control. Whose accountability is it to raise this as an organizational impediment if it is blocking progress?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Not every blocker lives inside the team's four walls, and this one clearly doesn't — a certification lab's schedule isn't something the Developers can just fix by working differently. That's exactly the kind of organizational-level snag a Scrum Master is meant to notice, name, and help push on, even when the fix is well outside the Scrum Team's own hands.
Full Explanation
The Scrum Master serves the organization in part by helping identify and remove impediments to the Scrum Team's progress, and the Guide explicitly extends this beyond the team's own boundary to organizational-level obstacles that the Developers cannot resolve on their own, such as an external lab's scheduling cadence. The Product Owner's accountability is value and Product Backlog management — they may need to adjust the Product Backlog or Product Goal around this constraint, but raising and working the impediment itself is the Scrum Master's job, not theirs. The Developers being 'directly affected' doesn't make removing an external, organization-level constraint their accountability; they can escalate it, but the Guide places the removal work with the Scrum Master specifically because Developers should stay focused on the Sprint's work rather than negotiating with outside parties. Dismissing it as 'outside Scrum's scope' is the real trap here: the Guide does not limit the Scrum Master's impediment-removal accountability to only things fully inside the team's control — organizational impediments like this are a named part of the job. A concrete step: the Scrum Master engages whoever manages the lab relationship or schedules to negotiate a workable cadence, rather than leaving the Developers to plan around an unresolved external constraint alone.