Building trust in Distributed Scrum Teams

Correct Answer: Facilitate cross-departmental workshops to improve communication and collaboration.

Facilitating cross-departmental workshops is the most effective strategy to build trust as it enhances communication and collaboration among departments. Improved communication fosters mutual understanding and collaboration encourages teamwork, which collectively helps in establishing trust. Other strategies like increasing oversight or implementing rewards systems may address performance issues but do not directly build the underlying trust necessary for smooth interdepartmental interactions.

Correct Answer: Establish regular open-door sessions where employees can freely discuss their concerns with management.

Establishing regular open-door sessions where employees can freely discuss their concerns with management is the best strategy to build trust between employees and management. This approach encourages open communication and makes employees feel heard and valued. Increasing managerial oversight may create a sense of being monitored rather than trusted. Implementing a mandatory suggestion box can limit meaningful dialogue and feedback, and holding workshops solely focused on individual performance does not address the communication gap or build trust between employees and management.

Correct Answer: Arrange a discussion with the Product Owner to reprioritize and depression spike the workloads.

As a ScrumMaster, the focus should always be on the team and its well-being. Overworking can lead to fatigue and burnout, which adversely affects the productivity and morale of the team. Hence, the right course of action would be to arrange a discussion with the Product Owner to reprioritize and possibly depression spike the workloads. Reprioritizing would help the team focus on the most critical tasks, reducing the necessity for overtime work. Depression spike refers to the practice of reducing workloads temporarily to allow the team to recover from a period of high stress or burnout, which in this case should be beneficial. The other options are not as viable: insisting team members to still work overtime can further harm morale and productivity, just letting team members rest and halting the project temporarily can impact project deadlines as work is completely stopped, and outsourcing the work to another team is not a long-term solution and can introduce additional communication and coordination challenges.