The director of engineering in your organization always stresses the importance of meeting deadlines in order for the engineering department to be seen as a reliable source for the product management department. The director has calculated that the team’s velocity needs to increase an additional 15% to meet the commitment he made to management for the release date of the product.

He asks Steven, the team’s Scrum Master, to increase his team’s velocity. Which would be the best two responses for Steven to take? (Choose two)

A. He explains how a team uses the velocity of a Sprint primarily to forecast work for the next Sprint, not to perfectly predict future productivity. He refers the director to the Product Owner for all information concerning the progress of development.
B. He informs the director of organizational impediments he is aware of that prevent the team from being more productive. He suggests collaborating with him on how to remove these impediments.
C. He educates his director how it is part of a team’s self-organization to improve velocity. He invites the director to the next Sprint Retrospective to brainstorm on how they can improve.
D. He helps the director understand that it typically takes a few Sprints for a team to gradually increase the velocity up to the level expected. Meanwhile he presents this to the team as a challenge and a company goal, leaving it however up to them to figure out exactly how to achieve this.
E. He tells the director that this is not his responsibility in Scrum. He tells the director to work with the Product Owner to check whether the estimates on the Product Backlog are being respected during implementation.

Correct Answer: A,B

The Scrum Master serves the organization by helping employees and stakeholders understand and enact Scrum and empirical product development and causing change that increases the productivity of the Scrum Team. Also the Scrum Team uses velocity to forecast work and not to predict productivity.