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?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Picture the Scrum Master as a lightning rod that actually has to reach the ground — spotting the freeze policy isn't the job, connecting it to whoever can change it is. Quietly working around it hides the real problem, and doing it solo cuts the team out of something that affects their work. Surfacing it loudly, to the right owner, is how organizational impediments actually get removed instead of just tolerated.
Full Explanation
The Scrum Guide describes the Scrum Master as serving the organization by helping people understand and enact Scrum, including removing barriers between stakeholders and Scrum Teams — and impediments outside the team's own authority are exactly where that service matters most. The right move is to make the freeze policy's cost visible to whoever owns it and work toward a resolution, not to solve it invisibly. Bypassing the policy treats a systemic problem as a one-off workaround and leaves it in place to block the next team too. Negotiating an exception alone, without the team, turns the Scrum Master into a hidden fixer rather than someone building the organization's own ability to remove its impediments, and it denies the team the transparency they need to plan around the risk. Dropping the safety patch from the Product Backlog treats an organizational constraint as if it were a scope decision, when the real issue is a policy misaligned with the product's needs. A caveat: not every impediment can be removed immediately, and the Scrum Master's job is to keep pursuing it, not to guarantee same-Sprint resolution. Concrete check: track whether raised organizational impediments show up somewhere visible — a shared impediment log the Scrum Master follows up on — rather than living only in someone's memory.