8 Key Aspects of Scrum Master Role

Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth.
To me, the function and duty of a quality human being
is the sincere and honest development of one’s  potential.
Bruce Lee

Working as active Scrum Practitioner for almost 9+ years I have come up with my understanding of what is Scrum Master’s role, service to the team and key responsibilities. Earlier I have written about what Scrum Master should master, here I would like to concentrate on 8 Key Aspects of Scrum Master work. Focus areas so to say. Here those are….

Facilitator

• Facilitates Sprint Planning Meeting
• Facilitates Sprint Review Meeting
• Facilitates Backlog Refinement (aka Grooming) Meeting
• Facilitates Sprint Retrospective Meeting
• Facilitates Daily Scrum
• Facilitates Release / Roadmap Planning Sessions
• Facilitates whatever/whenever else Team and/or stakeholders communication is required to be facilitated (not about any collaboration)

Purpose: to improve shared task clarity, planning, bring in more transparency over status quo for team to see where do they stand (and plan to go, and what have they achieved and how they want to improve) and their work results, help team to be able to enhance communication and perform their daily work

Team Builder

• Cultivates “us” vs. “me” culture and mindset
• Enables and fosters team to self-organize
• Helps team to make decisions
• Supports team through stages of its development
• Coaches individual team members on communication, collaboration and teamwork when necessary
• Increases “bandwidth” of communication among team members
• Observes team and talks to every single team member
• When required does one-on-ones to help through raising conflicts
• Navigates conflicts (involves management when necessary)

Purpose: to build up better team => better understanding each other => improved collaboration among team members => improved team performance

Team Guardian

• Guards team agreements, decisions and process (e.g. retrospective decisions, agreed “howtos”, DoD, DoR, review process, etc)
• Make team stick to its agreements, drives teamwork and respect towards owning decisions, leading to performance improvements
• Keeps balance between fulfilling business (Product Owner) needs and maintaining team sustainable pace, so that business needs are addressed by PO requests while team development and pace is not forgotten.
• Makes sure environment is as Team empowering as possible. Empowerment raises team feeling of ownership that rises up dedication and servers to better results
• Helps the team and Product Owner to maintain their artifacts (product backlog, sprint backlog, task and action boards, sprint/release burndown charts, tickets comments, story maps, etc.)

Purpose: create and maintain environment where high demand is possible. Here is why that is important

Impediment “Fisher” & Resolver

• Creates environment for effective impediment “fishing” and removal. Cultivates transparency and information radiation as pre-requisite for impediment clarity and removal
• Enables team to respond to impediments
  • Raises awareness of team’s impediments
  • Coaches team in resolving impediments (the one’s that could be solved by team)
  • Helps team to discover new impediments (wastes). Constantly questions the status-quo
  • Helps to resolve impediments / take ownership of those cannot be solved within / by team
• Improves efficiency of the team by helping with eliminating impediments
• Escalates and follows up on impediments to where they belong

“High Focus” Promoter

• Shields team from external interferences (extra tasks, todos not agreed with Product Owner, etc)
• Enables team to concentrate on most important todos, achieving “state of flow” and high concentration.
• Helps to avoid wastes caused by context-switching and to avoid team member burn-outs
• Gardens team’s sustainable pace, so that combined with “empowered” environment of high demand is possible
• Increases feeling of “urgency” and highlights how much is left to achieve (e.g. tickets, story tasks, story points, etc.), e.g. with the help of burndown charts, tickets left, etc.
• Helps team to focus on regularly achieving small thing to create feeling of fulfillment and good progress

 Motivator and Coach

• Promotes positive thinking, open, honest and respectful feedback culture
• Motivates team to improve team productivity regularly
• Helps to raise team morale, to increase dedication and to improve team deliverables
• Helps to create feeling of achievement
• Creates environment of excellence and continuous improvement (and mindset of seeking for improvements)
• Creates mindset of “quality first”, intolerance to poor quality and continuous improvement
• Regularly takes care of team’s “happiness” (and involves management when necessary)
• Coaches and teaches required mindset, frameworks and engineering practices (Lean thinking, Scrum, Kanban, XP, pair programming, continuous integration, test automation, etc.)
• Teaches and integrates new team members into working process and agreements (and into the team)
• Serves as agent for change and positive challenger of the team
• Reflects integrity and leads by example (e.g. being on time, continuously self-improving, sticking to agreements, etc.…)

Reflector

• Reflects Lean thinking and Agile principles to the team
• Reflects on reality and promotes transparency on status-quo to question
• Makes things measurable where applicable and possible to illustrate team progress: brings transparency about what is done, how much is achieved, so that weaknesses are easier to identify and potential improvements are easier to see
• Helps team to radiate information (e.g. burndowa, burnup charts, impediment boards, hapiness matrix, knowledge matrix, peerwork matris, etc.)
• Introduces required measurements for team to see regularly its work results (e.g. tickets achieved, stories done, story points achieved, bugs popped up/fixed, retrospective decisions implemented, ..)
• Uses collected data to think and question team and act if required

Agileist: outside of Scrum Team

• Shares Agile/Lean mindset within organization
• Shares best practices and tools, so that other Scrum Masters can benefit / see different perspective of managing things and company can benefit from enriched toolbox of methods and practices
• Collaborates and helps other Stakeholders to learn how their requests could be fulfilled with the team doing Scrum (or Kanban), so that other Stakeholders could get their requests address while team’ pace is also protected
• Helps to improve organization by creating learning organization
• Helps to address organization’s impediments

Last and not least there are many other things that do not belong to this structure. Those are dependent on situation and circumstances.  And those are still handled by great Scrum Masters 🙂

When self-organization does NOT work: teamwork hints

Scrum is based on “Empower the Team” Lean principle that prescribes self-organization. This means that regardless of age and experience team members are equal and serve as managers to one another. There is strong rationale behind: people that do the work are the best to manage it as they own responsibility of results and know best how to handle it.

Daily stand-up or daily SCRUM is a team tool to reflect on changing reality and adapt accordingly.

I’d like to point out some cases when self-organization does not work as should and help those teams out to boost their productivity.

Let us discover some sick stand-up/self-organization symptoms first…

1. Refraining from exposing problems (ignorance of reality):

• Task takes longer than planned and reasons are not clear to everyone (or something holds back people from raising problems);
• Task is blocked and impediment is not exposed/raised (this also may indicate some other problem with task that is not comfortable to raise);
• It’s just a way it is (yes we all know that we’ve planned 4 hours for that task, but as usual it takes us 2,3,5,… times longer or this guy always messes things up, we can do nothing, etc…);
• Team does not reflect during a day on changing reality (just in stand-ups), leading to impediments piling up and being addressed late, so that they mask something else;
• Etc…;

2. Intolerance to critical feedback:

• Team member pushes back heavily when someone tries to rise a problem related to his/her task;
• Raising problems considered as de-motivating and team silently prefer to hide them until it’s too late;
• Team members prefer to stay “nice” to each other rather than constructively criticize their plan in order to adapt it daily;
• Etc…;

Those two are inter-related. As a team member one will hold back from giving critical feedback if receives push back from his/her peer leading to confrontation and poor->no self-organization…

Scrum Masters, look around. Don’t you observe those symptoms during your stand-ups and/or during daily work?

If yes then…

Try out following cures ….

• Talk to push-backers one on one, try to understand what makes them do so? It could be personal issues with team members, lack of positive feedback or self-esteem, or other personal or inter-personal problem(s). It also could be absence of trust (readiness to look vulnerable to the team).
• Explain that feedback is not oriented towards person, rather towards team (exposes problem) as there are no personal problems in a team, since problem causes wastes, further slowness, incompleteness and later sprint failure of entire team.
• Focus person on constructiveness rather de-structiveness when exposing problem and coach on asking why 5 times, usually it helps to come up with adequate counter measures to remove root cause of the problem;
• Educate other team members that raising questions is crucial and needed, but highlight issues and offer them to try out different ways to do so (there may be personal barriers for push-backers, so more “gentle” way may be less stressful while lead to the same result, e.g. instead of asking “Why you did not finish this task so far”?, try “What holds you back from completing this task”?
• Cultivate more solution oriented then problem stating approach (as solution is vector, while problem is scalar);
• Talk to entire team that problems are normal and ignoring them just postpones failure. So they require courage to face and team spirit to overcome, that makes difference between team and group of people. Exposing problem does not mean it shall become energy-drainer and de-motivator, rather it’s in-time red flag that shall re-focus team on next right thing to do;
• If conflict is unavoidable and your peers do not go with “exposing problems approach”, steer it, but not let pile it up (nice article on conflict avoidance here);
• Launch team storming to “shorten the distance” between team members, so that exposing problems is more constructive and easy (see: “Teamleads, “Storming”, Self-organization and Entropy”)
• Propose and drive team branding activity to help them find out shared values and motivators (see: “Team DNA: how to Brand up your team”);

To summarize, work both ways with ones who raise (also including you if you are in SM role) and with ones who push back to make raising problems comfortable and easy.

Good Luck!