Answering: “Sharing people with unique skills across multiple teams will likely result in which of the following conditions?”

Sharing scarce specialists across teams usually makes teams wait for them, which slows the delivery of value. Higher utilization does not mean more value delivered.

Exam Question

Sharing people with unique skills across multiple teams will likely result in which of the following conditions?
(choose the best answer)
A. Teams may wait more often, impeding the delivery of value.
B. Costs are lower because expensive resources are shared.
C. Teams do not have to develop deep technical skills.
D. More work gets done because people are better utilized.

Correct Answer

A. Teams may wait more often, impeding the delivery of value.

Why This Is the Correct Answer

When one specialist serves several teams, each team’s work queues up behind the others. The Scrum Guide’s description of cross-functional teams, with all the skills needed to create value each Sprint, exists to avoid exactly this dependency. A shared expert becomes a bottleneck, and teams either sit idle or start new work while items wait, which raises work in progress and delays feedback. Lean thinking, one of Scrum’s foundations, treats this waiting as waste. Better options are spreading the skill within teams through pairing or training so that no single person blocks the flow.

Why the Other Options Are Wrong

B. Costs are lower because resources are shared. Salary costs may look lower, but delays and waiting increase the cost of getting value to customers.

C. Teams don’t need deep technical skills. Teams still need the skills to deliver. Relying on an outsider leaves them blocked without that person.

D. More work gets done through better utilization. Busy people are not the same as finished work. High utilization of a bottleneck usually lengthens queues.

Exam Tip

Scrum.org exams favour flow and value over resource utilization. If an option praises keeping people busy, it is usually the trap.

Key Takeaways

• Shared specialists create waiting and bottlenecks.
• Cross-functional teams reduce dependencies.
• Utilization is not the same as value delivered.