A lot of people ask, what does a Scrum master do every day? Now we can elevate this and say, scrum master, agile coach, whatever the term is that you want to call it, but we'd like to talk about that today because it is very hard to determine what is the task list that this person does each and every day.
Hi, my name is Lance Dacy. I'm otherwise known as Big Agile. And one of the big questions we often get when we're helping organizations achieve agility and they choose to practice, let's say a framework like Scrum, then we have to go over the three roles of Scrum.
Understanding the Three Scrum Roles
Typically we'll say, well, a Scrum team is a team made up of 10 or less people. That includes a product owner, a scrum master, and eight or less developers.
- The product owner focuses on working with our stakeholders, understanding the market, and what are the priorities of the work and the problems that need to be tackled.
- Our developers are a cross-functional team of people that have all skills required to build a usable increment of the product.
- Our Scrum masters and Agile coach that helps both of those parts work together, but also ensuring that the organization has a culture that breeds the agility that we're striving for within our teams.
So a Scrum team has all skills required on the team to accomplish their goals. The product owners driving the priorities within the business goals or the OKRs or whatever it is that you're using to establish those outcomes. The developers have all skills on the team that are experts on how to solve that problem. And then the scrum master is ensuring that we all do it well together. So they focus on the product owner, the developers, and the organization.
Why the Scrum Master Role Is Often Misunderstood
When you're explaining Scrum to an organization, and the first thing that they typically ask is what are the roles? Product owners aren't a far stretch for what they already have because product managers exist. I call product management a job, product owners a hat or a role in Scrum that a product manager typically wears. But the product management activities have to happen regardless of what process you choose to manage your work. So it's not a far stretch for the leadership of the organization to go, okay, I understand a product owner. We've always had to have those.
When you think about a developer, well, if in software you're thinking of programmers, testers, database people, business analysts, architects, designers, no matter what process we've used, we've had to have those people. So they're like, okay, now we're going to organize 'em a little bit different than probably what they're used to. Organizational design is a big part of that, but as far as the roles concerned, they pretty well understand that.
Now you get to this scrum master or as some people are now referring to as the scrum lead, or we can even generalize it as an agile coach, well, what does this person do? And you're like, well, they kind of observe how the teams are working and offer guidance and direction on how they can perform better. They're also there trying to ensure that the organization and everybody involved understand the framework and the philosophy and the theory and the values and the principles, and also ensuring that everybody's getting what they need out of that framework.
So you start talking about that and they glaze over because they're like, well, we've never had a role like that. You're right. There's very few processes out there that have a role dedicated to continuous improvement and ensuring that we achieve agility.
The Core Purpose of a Scrum Master
Now, if I had to summarize Agile in a sentence, I would say Agile is about organizing and optimizing our teams and backlogs and organization to deliver the highest business value items as early as possible with the least amount of cost and friction. And the Scrum coach, scrum master, scrum lead, agile coach, whatever you want to call 'em, are focused on making us better at that.
Why There's No Standard Daily Task List
So what is their task list every day? It's very difficult to articulate that because they are responding to the needs of everyone. I can't sit down and say every day, here's what I'm going to do. If I'm a coach, I observe, I build out a plan. Some plans are made aware to the team and the organization. Some I'm just an undercurrent trying to pull things around and make things happen. I call it the Wizard of Oz, pay no attention to that person behind the curtain. But there's a lot of effort that goes into that and a lot of knowledge you have to gain over time to be able to do that.
The Scrum Master Checklist: A Practical Framework
Michael James produced a checklist a long time ago. He's a fellow certified scrum trainer, and his checklist did a really good job outlining maybe instead of a task list, what you should be thinking about each and every day as a scrum master. Now, he's recently updated this. I'll say 2022 is a recent update because it was a long time before then. But notice how he talks about the Scrum master being a full-time facilitator.
What I love about the checklist is you can go down here and say, okay, managers and leaders, here's what a scrum master does. They're asking themselves, if we're practicing Scrum, how is my product owner doing? So we've come up with a list here of things that what should you be thinking about to ensure your product owner is effective?
So you would just score yourself maybe on a score of one to five on each one of these bullet points, and the ones that you're a five, which means we're doing perfect, and the ones that you're a one are the ones that we need a lot of work in, you start building out a plan. You can't fix every problem all at one time, so you have to prioritize. You got to drink your own champagne of Agile and prioritize the highest value items with the minimal cost and friction to deliver so that you can start making some really good headway in your organization.
But I love this checklist. It's just scrummasterchecklist.org is the website, and you can download this and just go through it yourself. If you're a scrum master, scrum lead, agile coach, how are you doing in these things? This is very subjective to your view, but hopefully you have a good opinion of where you want to take the team. That's what a great coach is. Give everybody a hug where they are now, map out a plan and getting 'em where they want to be, or sometimes they don't know where they want to be.
Key Areas the Checklist Covers
So just look at this checklist and it focuses on:
- The team
- The product owner
- Engineering practices - You're a technology team. There's no doubt that you will have a full-time job exploring with your team. You may not always know what those engineering practices should be, but you're going to be exploring a lot trying to get us better, because the better we are at building our product, the faster we will go.
Agile's not some magical thing that just makes us go faster. It's about discipline and rigor being effective, and the more effective you are typically the faster you'll go over time. So we call it sooner, not faster necessarily.
Working on the Organization, Not in It
Now, the last part is the big one. How's our organization doing? Scrum Masters work on the organization not in it. And that's very difficult for a lot of leaders and managers to understand because they haven't had a role like that. So one of the first things we like to do when helping an organization embrace Scrum is really make way for the Scrum master role.
Typically, they'll try to carve that off and have a developer do it, have a product owner do it. So how much effectiveness can you be doing dual triple roles, and who else is going to be doing that work if we don't do it? So there's a lot of things that we have to explore.
The Four Quadrants of Scrum Master Activities
But the last thing I'm going to talk about is Scrum Masters. If you are struggling to try to articulate where your headspace is on all the work you have to do, I like to look at this Eisenhower quadrant that we teach in our certified Scrum master class, and excuse my handwriting here, but it's basically a quadrant that says any activities that are on the left hand side of this quadrant, we're typically more, or I'm sorry, less directive to the team. So we're helping the team achieve something, but they're kind of figuring things out. They're the ones that have the knowledge on how to do it, whereas the things on the right hand side here, we typically have more of the knowledge and we're trying to be more hands-on and a little bit more directive.
And so these four quadrant areas here, I try to map out what are the job items that a scrum master does.
1. Facilitating (Less Directive, Larger Groups)
There's going to be sometimes, well actually a lot of times where we have to facilitate. So facilitating is more about guiding discussions or processes without directing the outcome, you're just trying to make sure the right people are in the room and you're facilitating activities to help them draw that information out and eventually come to a consensus about a decision. So we're not really responsible for the outcomes, we're just giving the teams the best effective way to arrive at it. So facilitating is a big part of our job, and sometimes people think that's all we do, but that's not it.
2. Teaching (More Directive, Larger Groups)
The other side on this quadrant is teaching. There's going to be so many times that you teach stakeholders, the organization, leaders, teams, how to effectively use Scrum or any other agile practice to achieve their outcomes. So if you notice on this quadrant, the left hand side, were less directive. The right hand side were more directive. And on the top side, you're usually working with the larger group. So many teams, multiple teams, the whole organization. So not all the time, but facilitating and teaching is kind of the way that I like to use to map out some of the activities that we do as a agile coach.
3. Coaching (Less Directive, Smaller Groups)
Down here on the bottom here, another big part of the world that we live in is coaching. And so coaching is really just guiding teams to kind of self-discover the best way to work and improve their own processes. You may have ideas for that, but we're trying to lead that more to the team because more bought into things when they come up with the solution. So facilitating is more about guiding discussions and helping the team manage the knowledge they already have.
4. Mentoring (More Directive, Smaller Groups)
Teaching is more about providing knowledge or instruction, maybe about scrum principles or practices or frameworks so that people can have that knowledge to perform better. Coaching is more guiding the team. And then the last one we have here is kind of a blurred line, is mentoring. So mentoring is really more about you sharing personal experiences to support professional growth. Now notice down here we're typically working with smaller teams. So it may just be one team or people on the team where you do coaching and mentoring and where facilitating and teaching is usually more for a larger scenario.
Key Takeaways for Understanding the Scrum Master Role
So one of the first things that we have to do when we're helping organizations achieve agility is understand what agile is. You can't do agile. You want to be agile. There's many ways to do it. Scrum is a way not the way to be agile, but it is one of the most popular frameworks. So the scrum master term gets thrown around but often misunderstood.
So I hope today we gave you a little bit of background on why it's such an issue that it's very difficult to get a task list of what a Scrum master does every day. And in summary, it's generally because we're always responding to the needs of others. I have to evaluate, I have to assess before I can come up with a plan.
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