SSM Supporting Team Events Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  Tell the Product Owner that over-commitment is normal and that the team will improve on its own without any facilitation.

  Why it's wrong here

  Dismissing the Product Owner's concern ignores a real predictability problem and misses an opportunity to coach the team. Over-commitment rarely resolves without deliberate reflection and adjustment. The Scrum Master should facilitate a data-informed conversation rather than assume improvement will happen spontaneously. Doing nothing also strains the relationship between the team and the Product Owner, which can harm collaboration during planning and reviews.

• ✗

  Reduce the team's velocity target in the team's metrics so the gap between planned and completed work appears smaller.

  Why it's wrong here

  Adjusting the velocity target to mask the gap falsifies the team's data and destroys transparency. Velocity is an observed outcome, not a target to be manipulated. Changing it to make reports look better prevents the team and its stakeholders from seeing the real problem and learning from it. The Scrum Master should protect the integrity of metrics, not alter them to avoid uncomfortable conversations about predictability.

• ✗

  Set a hard cap on the number of stories the team can pull and enforce it during every Iteration Planning session.

  Why it's wrong here

  Imposing a hard cap removes the team's ability to self-manage and decide how much work it can take on. While the intent is to improve predictability, the Scrum Master is not the decision-maker for the team's capacity. Enforcement also treats the symptom rather than the cause, such as estimation accuracy, unfinished work, or dependencies. The team needs to learn to forecast realistically, not have a limit dictated to it.

• ✓

  Facilitate a discussion with the team and Product Owner about capacity, past velocity, and why commitments are missed, then help the team adjust its own forecasting.

  Why this is correct

  The Scrum Master serves the team by facilitating transparency and helping it use data such as velocity and capacity to make realistic forecasts. Involving the Product Owner aligns expectations and clarifies priorities without removing the team's ownership of how much work it takes on. This approach addresses root causes and builds the team's ability to forecast accurately over time, which is more sustainable than imposed limits.