Most new Scrum Masters have a rudimentary comprehension of their new role. Many have undergone training and received their Licensed Scrum Master designation. They are thrilled and keen to don on their mantle of a Scrum Master in the event their teams invite them in formally. Once their initial enthusiasm starts fading away, a troublesome hesitation begins to take shape. Daily, in the midst of paying attention to and smoothing the daily standups, a quiet thought begins to flow in the Scrum Master’s mind:
The role of the Scrum Master is a difficult one for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that they have no authority; in fact the Scrum Team can fire them. Scrum Master is an expression misconstrued so quite often, sometimes consciously, which causes misunderstanding. The appellation itself hints people to unseemly assumptions because of the attachment of the term ‘Master’. Some consider this person is in reality the administrator of the Scrum Team or a synonymous term used in place of “Project Manager” in Traditional Project manager frameworks. One approach used when adapting Scrum is to redefine the role of the managers and convert them into the Scrum Masters for their respective Scrum Teams. In reality, Scrum Master is not giving the orders, neither the expert, nor the intermediary, or the negotiator. Scrum Master is not the administrator of the Scrum Team and without doubt not the project manager under an innovative label.
The Scrum Master has four key duties:
• Facilitation of the stakeholders and interfaces
• Agent of change within the organization
• Impairment remover
• Remover of distance between business and development
Many people who take on the role of Scrum Master have to be, to some degree or other re-trained into their new role. The Scrum Master is a servant-leader to the Scrum Team.
A Scrum Master should embolden, encourage, challenge, intercede, interrogate, pay attention and perceive in equal quantity toward making the rest of the Scrum team as effective as possible and altering the organizational environment to be more cooperative to Scrum framework. Ultimately Scrum Master is inconsequential in the Scrum process because he/she neither is making the payment for, nor in receipt of, the product. Scrum Master should understand his/her part therefore as a facilitator. Those who are openly involved in production should come to the deductions they need to forge ahead. Every now and then, this is quite easy and the Scrum Teams recognize the answer but essential to be inquired a few unpretentious questions to comprehend this. Usually, it really is a multifaceted situation where not one person knows what the solution is and the best the Scrum Master can do is to search options before The Scrum team decides on the best answer for that time. Occasionally, it is essential to fail in order to find a better way. A Scrum Master may have to find techniques from diverse fields – thinking, inquiring, advising rather than directing – to be useful in her endeavor of Scrum Master.
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