Effective Facilitation Techniques for the Scrum Master
Is Scrum Master a facilitator?
The most common answer is YES. I was hosting a meetup on the same topic and asked a very academic question there. Do you know how many times the facilitation keyword appeared in the Scrum Guide? Here is the response from participants.
It appeared at one place under the Scrum Master services to the Product Owner — Facilitating stakeholder collaboration as requested or needed.
However, Scrum Masters are responsible for upholding the Scrum Process to enable self-managed cross-functional teams to develop products, and facilitating effective adoption of the Scrum is needed for the same. But, ordinary facilitation may impact the effectiveness of the team in a self-managed environment. Let’s deep dive into the role of a facilitator to understand a little more about it.
Straight from the Scrum Guide: The Scrum Master serves the Scrum Team in several ways, including:
- Coaching the team members in self-management and cross-functionality;
- Helping the Scrum Team focus on creating high-value Increments that meet the Definition of Done;
- Causing the removal of impediments to the Scrum Team’s progress;
- Ensuring that all Scrum events take place and are positive, productive, and kept within the timebox.
I will focus on the last three points: creating high-value increments based on the definition of done by ensuring positive and productive outcome from Scrum events and influencing reasons behind impediments. All these need effective facilitation techniques to be applied by a Scrum Master.
What’s the meaning of effective facilitation?
It is facilitation, not decision making by an individual. Have you been to a meeting like below?
- Everyone waiting for the Scrum Master to start the Retrospective
- A Scrum Master does most talking during the Sprint Planning.
- Everyone waiting for his/her name to be get called during daily Standup
- A Scrum Master is busy explaining new microstructure from the Liberating Structure.
- A Product Owner invited stakeholders to review but only explained what the team has done.
- Design discussion turned out to be a lecturing session by an Architect.
- The retrospective meeting turned out to blame each other, and the team member’s optimism quickly evaporated.
In a self-managed cross-functional Scrum team, decision-making authority lies with the team members and collectively, not with an individual in isolation. Effective facilitation means collective decision within a given timebox, which focuses on the outcome within the Sprint. The outcome of the Sprint is a Done Increment meeting the Sprint Goal.
The focus for a facilitator should be on below to have an effective outcome from the Sprint.
- The Scrum team crafts a meaningful Sprint Goal
- They own the sprint goal collectively and collaboratively.
- Comes up with an initial and doable plan to meet the sprint goal
- Review the Sprint Goal daily basis within the allocated timebox
- Self-managed to deals with impediments that endanger the Sprint Goal
- Review the Sprint Goal and the Increment against the Product Goal along with stakeholders and talks about the future direction
- Commit to doing differently to maximize the values in upcoming sprints
What does a facilitator do?
The facilitator makes sure team members trust him/her, and the team’s autonomy is maintained. The facilitator should be acceptable to all team members, be substantively neutral. The facilitator should display no preference for any of the solutions the team considers and not have decision-making authority. It becomes challenging when a Scrum Master (a facilitator) also a part of the development team. The facilitator’s main task is to help the team increase its effectiveness by improving its process. — based on The Skilled Facilitator
Basic and Developmental Facilitation techniques — here are fundamental differences between these two.
A developmental facilitator intervened under the same conditions as a basic facilitator. But besides, a developmental facilitator intervenes when the group’s process or other factors affecting the group hinder the group’s long-term effectiveness or when reflecting on the process will help members develop their process skills. The interventions are designed to help the group learn how to diagnose and improve their process.
Take the example of Sprint Planning — what’s the goal of effective sprint planning? Scrum Team crafts the sprint goal, forecasts PBIs/stories to meet the goal, and designs a strategy to complete the PBIs. A Scrum Master’s role is to ensure all these are happening and remind them to do it within the timebox. What if a Scrum Master focuses on helping the team understand the purpose and educate what is needed to have a better outcome. Scrum Master should teach the team how to do the same thing for itself and not do. Here is a team effectiveness model that may help a Scrum Master to do better facilitation.
What makes the Scrum Team effective?
A scrum Team becomes effective if members are aware of authority over the elements of group effectiveness. A self-managed team should have authority over below:-
- Team culture
- Team norms
- decision making
- Conflict Management
- Communication
- Boundry management
These all can be driven through having a meaningful team agreement, check on language, communication style, collaborative approach, and collective ownership. A successful Scrum Master may mentor the team on all these or take help from outside. These are impediments towards team effectiveness, and a Scrum Master is accountable for team effectiveness.
Core Values for effective facilitation
These values guide effective team behavior and consider consequences when a team member's actions are inconsistent with the core values.
Valid information: what if a scrum team member withholds crucial information related to application security to win the discussion during retrospective or team members not sharing technical debt with the product owner?
In developmental facilitation, the team members develop the ability over time to identify inconsistencies with the core values and correct the behavior without the help of a Scrum Master.
Free and informed choice: team members define their own objective to achieving them, like how much work the team can do during the sprint, and the team is not coerced or manipulated by a Scrum Master during facilitation.
Internal commitment to the choice: every member feels personally responsible for their decision, such as team member commits to high quality and identifies the work that crucial for the same, so members take personal responsibility to do that.
Scrum Masters should also use the core values to guide their own behavior.
Aligning these core values with the Scrum values often results in a better outcome.
Is Scrum Master responsible for self-managed team’s outcome?
Some inexperienced Scrum Masters may feel totally responsible for a team’s success or failure and believe they are to blame on the occasion of failure, wherein some Scrum Masters may feel it is a failure of the team and have no role in it. Ideally, a Scrum Master is not responsible for what the team decides but may influence the team by educating them on expected behavior from a self-managed team and acting effectively.
Ground rules for an effective Scrum Team
Here are 10 rules to be effective through facilitation for a Scrum Team based on The Skilled facilitator.
- Test assumptions and inferences such as design, UI/UX, testing approach, and requirements.
- Share all relevant information during the Scrum events, including what worked and what didn’t.
- Be specific and use examples so everyone in the team can recall/visualize scenarios/situations shared by the team member.
- Disagree openly with any member considering everyone is strong enough to clear his/her position in a self-managed team.
- Make statements, then invite questions and comments to have collective ownership.
- Discuss uncomfortable issues demonstrating the Scrum values.
- Do not take a cheap shot to win the argument. Everyone valued your position in a long-lived team, so no extra effort is needed.
- Exchange relevant information with people outside the team, especially during the sprint review.
- Make decisions by consensus even if other members have less knowledge about your area of work.
- Do self-critiques.
Diagnosis-Intervention cycle — an observation tool for an effective Scrum Master in facilitation.
Observation is a powerful mechanism to enable self-managed and help the team be effective by adhering to core values. Don’t be judgemental during observation, but it is ok to infer meaning but don’t forget to test inferences with the team. Often, we become judgemental during observation due to cognitive biases. Cognitive biases enable faster decisions, which can be desirable when timeliness is more valuable than accuracy but often leads to a systemic problem. Here is a diagnosis-intervention cycle that helps a Scrum Master check his/her own biases during the Scrum Events.
Where to learn all these?
Ideally, attending Professional Scrum Master II should help you learn a bit of it but consider attending ICAgile — Agile Coach (ICP-ACC) training. I don’t want to promote myself here, but I can say that I cover all in these 2 training classes even I have to go beyond the prescribed agenda for the training. Just passing the PSM II exam means nothing because there is hardly anything to learn there. I wrote a long blog on that here — How To Pass The Professional Scrum Master (PSM II) Assessment.
Summary
It is good that a Scrum Master always trying to learn something new to become an effective facilitator, but it is more important that they teach those to the team so the team can become self-managed. Knowing and using ice-breakers, liberating structures, various types of games, and activities as basic facilitator may become an impediment in the journey towards self-management.
