Dedicated Scrum Master Love

The main objective of a team lead is to help the members of the team in any way possible to solve their problems. The natural inclination of organizations I have been part of during an agile adoption is to make the team lead the Scrum Master. This has “worked” in the past but now I feel we never practiced Scrum to its full potential. During my most recent agile transformation at Indigo, it is seeing two very dedicated professional Scrum Masters practice their defined role that I truly have seen the true impact and benefits of scrum.

The Scrum Master is a servant leader whose main responsibility is to maintain the focus on the team to help deliver its goal and facilitating the many ceremonies involved with scrum. Many organization start with this role definition and believes this can be a “part-time” role considering the rituals doesn’t take the entire work day and how many blockers are there that needs resolving anyways? In my experience, this is probably the wrong mindset since the positive impacts Scrum Masters provide transcends a typical work day and improves the overall product, people culture, and process.

Product

How does a dedicated Scrum Master improve product? I believe they are the best facilitators between the product owner (why?) and the team (how?) with a focus on the most efficient and customer centric way of delivering value. The best products are built when there are a mutual understanding between the product owner and the team with all the context and rationale given and the problems are solved together.

Working with the product owner, the Scrum Masters help with stakeholder management so that they are well aware of their roles and responsibilities. They work endlessly with the product owners to ensure that the backlog is clear and there is a transparent roadmap that gives the development team insights into the future.

Working with the cross functional development team, the Scrum Masters help foster the open mindedness and techniques for breaking large amount of work (risky!) to smaller incremental chunks. They interact with the team and the product owner to ensure that there is capacity in the sprint backlog for spikes and technical investigations. This helps create an environment where experimentation (and failed ones) are acceptable.

People Culture

At Indigo, my mandate grew where I was overseeing the technology work for six scrum teams and managing over 30 developers. From a visibility and operational standpoint, I regrettably was not able to take care of day to day issues or resolving all the small team dynamic problems before it escalates. Having a dedicated Scrum Master as a partner in building team culture along with the technical leads strengthens our ability to instantiates the values we all believe in.

A culture of continuous improvement, the Scrum Master is suppose to protect the team — most of the time we think the protection needs to happen from some scary external stakeholder, but most of the time I find they’re protecting the team from themselves. Lets say the team have a great retrospective and came back with some action points they commit to doing and then two sprints later they are back to their old habits. Protecting themselves from themselves is protecting them from going back to their old habits which is hard to do when you are a team lead in the thick of things. As a servant leader, they use their power of influence for the teams to be honest with themselves and stick to their new agreed upon practices.

Another aspect of culture is self organizing. Getting a team to self organize is not a given, and coaching a team to self organize is about how they to decide to respond as one to their environment. I find that effective Scrum Masters will ask hard questions to the team and wait for them to respond. This encourages them to not drive to a consensus, but to a place of creativity through diversity of opinions. Its challenging for a team lead to facilitate the same conversations because these hard questions require a certain level of objectivity and input from them.

Process

I believe Scrum Masters should own the process :) They act as the agile coach not only within the scrum teams that they manage but also the broader organization including the stakeholders for the entire product life cycle journey. Just as the expectations for many of the technical leads within the organization is to innovate and gain knowledge in technology and development process — its very enlightening to see someone dedicated to mastering the agile craft. Everyone can administer the daily stand up or research new techniques for retrospectives as there are an abundance of information online, but Scrum Masters as part of their accountability, will seek out the best retrospective technique to gain the most insights or to up-skill the team for better delivery. Tech leads are accountable for the technical direction and delivery of the product and as such, will be seeking out insights and expertise from fellow technology experts, blogs and conferences. Likewise, Scrum Masters will be seeking out experts, blogs, and conferences related to process and agile improvement. This experience and passion cannot be overlooked, as the continual improvements of a process tailored to a team is what adds to the success.

I am not advocating that having dedicated Scrum Masters are the best (in fact our Scrum Masters look after multiple teams concurrently) but to highlight how it has helped our organization during our agile transition and growth of the technology organization.

Thank you Manas + Kajany for your on-going partnership with myself and the rest of my team ❤