Scaling Scrum

Correct Answer: By facilitating alignment activities such as big room planning, ensuring transparency about the product vision and objectives, and advocating for connection between work and business outcomes.

The obligation of a Certified ScrumMaster in a Scaled Scrum environment extends beyond only managing the framework. They are also responsible for ensuring the team members understand the vision and objectives of the product and how their work contributes to these goals. Therefore, the best solution would be to facilitate alignment activities that make clear the connection between individual tasks and larger business outcomes, ensuring transparency about the product's objectives, and advocating for correlation between the work performed and the end results. The other answers are not ideal because: The second answer suggesting team members to focus only on their assigned tasks, contradicts with the agile principles that promotes a comprehensive understanding of the project for better productivity. The third answer suggests escalating the situation to executive management without proposing a solution - as a Certified ScrumMaster, one needs to have the ability to address such concerns and not rely solely on upper management. The fourth option of asking employees to talk to their line managers might not solve the problem if the managers themselves lack clarity about the product's vision and goals or if they follow a strict hierarchical communication approach.

Correct Answer: Introduce the concept of scaling the Product Owner role, possibly in form of a Chief Product Owner and Area Product Owners.

The best answer is introducing the concept of scaling the Product Owner role. This is because in a scaled agile environment where there are multiple scrum teams working on the same product, it is often beneficial to have more than one individual fulfilling the Product Owner role. This can take the form of a Chief Product Owner, who is in charge of strategic decisions, and Area Product Owners, who handle more tactical, team-level decisions. This approach ensures that each team's needs are adequately addressed without overwhelming a single Product Owner. Now, why the other answers are not the best choice: Offloading some of the Product Owner responsibilities onto the Scrum Master goes against the Scrum principles. The Scrum Master and Product Owner each have distinct roles and responsibilities and offloading duties between them should be avoided. Letting teams self-organize and not involve the Product Owner in day-to-day decisions can impact the value being delivered as well as the prioritization of work. The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product and work of the Development Team, removal of them from day-to-day decisions may lead to lack of direction. Lastly, hiring more Product Owners without considering the roles and responsibilities is not the solution. Indeed, adding more Product Owners might even create more chaos and confusion if there's not a clear understanding of how they'll work together, who's responsible for what, and how decision-making will be handled.

Correct Answer: Implement a synchronized sprint cadence across teams

The best practice in a Scaled Scrum framework for ensuring productivity and integration among Scrum teams working on different components of the same product is to implement a synchronized sprint cadence across teams. This approach ensures that all teams are working in alignment with each other, thereby facilitating easier collaboration, integration, and delivery. Synchronizing sprint cadences allows for simultaneous starts, progress, and ends of sprints across all teams, making it simpler to plan, review, and adjust as a unified entity. On the other hand, assigning a chief Scrum Master does not directly ensure productivity and integration in the context of working on different components; it merely centralizes communication and decision-making. Increasing the duration of sprints for teams with more complex components could lead to delays in integration and feedback, derailing the agile principle of delivering work in small, manageable increments. Organizing separate product backlog items for each team to prioritize independently can result in diverging priorities and a lack of unified vision for the product, undermining alignment and integration. Therefore, implementing a synchronized sprint cadence is essential for maintaining productivity and integration among teams in a scaled Scrum framework.