The Scrum Master is accountable for ensuring Scrum is understood and enacted correctly within the organization. The IT manager's request for a traditional status report indicates a misunderstanding of how progress is made transparent in Scrum. The Scrum Master's most effective action is to coach the manager, explaining that empirical progress is demonstrated by inspecting a tangible, "Done" Increment during the Sprint Review. This addresses the root cause of the request, educates the stakeholder, and protects the team from wasteful interruptions that do not contribute to the Sprint Goal, thereby upholding Scrum principles.

A. Tell the Developers to fit the report into the Sprint Backlog.

This treats a non-value-adding interruption as legitimate work, distracting the Developers from their primary focus of creating a valuable Increment and achieving the Sprint Goal.

B. Ask the Product Owner to send the manager the report.

This merely shifts the wasteful task to another team member and fails to address the manager's fundamental misunderstanding of Scrum's empirical nature.

C. Create and deliver the report to the manager herself.

This positions the Scrum Master as an administrative assistant rather than a coach and leader, reinforcing outdated practices and preventing the organization from properly adopting Scrum.

D. Tell the Scrum Team to figure it out themselves.

This is an abdication of the Scrum Master's responsibility to remove impediments and coach the organization, especially when the issue stems from a stakeholder external to the team.

1. Schwaber

K.

& Sutherland

J. (2020). The Scrum Guide. Scrum.org.

Page 7

"Scrum Master": "The Scrum Master serves the organization in several ways

including: Leading

training

and coaching the organization in its Scrum adoption; ... Helping employees and stakeholders understand and enact an empirical approach for complex work". This directly supports coaching the IT manager (Option E).

Page 10

"Sprint Review": "The purpose of the Sprint Review is to inspect the outcome of the Sprint and determine future adaptations. The Scrum Team presents the results of their work to key stakeholders and progress toward the Product Goal is discussed." This identifies the correct forum for stakeholders to understand progress.

2. Verwijs

C.

Russo

D.

& Gorschek

T. (2022). The role of the Scrum Master: a systematic literature review. PeerJ Computer Science

8

e1087.

Section "Identified activities"

Table 2: The paper identifies "Protecting the team" (including shielding from external interferences) and "Teaching

Mentoring

and Coaching" (including coaching stakeholders) as core Scrum Master activities. Option E is a direct application of these responsibilities

whereas options A

B

and C are contrary to them. (https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.1087)