CSM Scrum Events Practice Question
During the Sprint Retrospective, the Scrum Team identifies a major systemic impediment involving company HR policies that is slowing down delivery. What should the Scrum Master do?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often think the Scrum Master should tell the team to work around HR policies, ignoring the duty to address systemic organizational impediments.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Take accountability for resolving the organizational impediment by collaborating with leadership to influence changes outside the team.
The Scrum Master serves the organization by leading, training, and coaching in Scrum adoption, which includes helping remove organizational barriers. When impediments lie outside the team's immediate sphere of control, the Scrum Master must champion the issue upward, working with organizational leaders to enact structural changes that enable high performance.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Instruct the team to ignore HR policies because Scrum rules supersede all standard corporate governance and compliance frameworks.
Why it's wrong here
Scrum operates within organisational governance; instructing the team to breach HR policy exposes the company to compliance and employment risk. Escalating the impediment through management is the correct route. Ignoring policy is tempting because Scrum grants the team self-management over how it works, not exemption from law.
- ✓
Take accountability for resolving the organizational impediment by collaborating with leadership to influence changes outside the team.
Why this is correct
Organisational impediments spanning HR policy sit outside the team's authority, so the Scrum Master must own the resolution by engaging leadership and influencing change beyond the team boundary. This satisfies the retrospective's systemic impediment, which the team alone cannot remove.
- ✗
Discard the impediment from the Retrospective action plan because organizational culture changes are strictly impossible to achieve.
Why it's wrong here
Abandoning the impediment leaves the systemic HR constraint unresolved, so the team keeps absorbing its delivery impact. Raising organisational impediments to management is precisely the Scrum Master's remit; discarding them is tempting when the fix sits outside the team's authority, but that is when escalation matters most.
- ✗
Mandate that the Product Owner rewrite the Product Backlog to include tasks specifically assigned to HR department personnel.
Why it's wrong here
Rewriting the Product Backlog to assign HR tasks misuses the backlog, which orders product value, not departmental work allocation. The Scrum Master removes impediments by influencing the organisation; the temptation is that visible backlog items feel actionable, yet HR policy change is not a product increment.
About these practice questions
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Scrum Alliance exam blueprint
This CSM practice question is part of Courseiva's free Scrum Alliance certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CSM exam.