Beyond Boundaries: Strategies for Scrum Masters to Navigate New Responsibilities

Context

As a LinkedIn Top Voice on Scrum, I often get asked to answer questions on collaborative articles. However, the way LinkedIn breaks up the topics, and the character limit for each response, sometimes prevents me from writing in my natural voice. For instance, a few days ago, I was asked how to juggle other duties while serving as a Scrum Master for a team . I provided my comments, but felt vaguely unsatisfied. So I thought I will answer this more fully here.

While this article is about Scrum Masters taking on additional responsibilities, the principles apply to pretty much any role in tech.

Should a Scrum Master Take On an Additional Role?

Ideally, a Scrum Master shouldn't take on another role in addition to their Scrum Master duties. Because being a great Scrum Master for your team is a full time job. Here's a chart showing the rough distribution of an SM's time commitments from Ken Rubin's excellent book: The Essential Scrum.

As you can see, an SM has many hats to wear during a sprint and having to take on another responsibility will impact their usefulness to the team.

But, Sometimes You Just May Have to

This could be due to many reasons, some of which are listed below.

Budget cutbacks: As I write this in Mar 2024, the tech sector (at least in Canada) is shedding jobs and many open roles are not being filled due to market uncertainty. So, a team might find themselves without a key person or (more likely) have bandwidth constraints around some roles.

Job Security: Closely related to budget cutbacks, a Scrum Master might feel that their job is at risk due to budget cutbacks and might want to build a secondary competency so that their job is safe(r).

Skill stacking: One of the few good reasons to take on an additional role would be to pick up a skill that adds value to your profile. I have written about this in an earlier edition of this newsletter.

Adding Meaning to a job you hate: You do not like your current role, but cannot switch to another one due to any number of reasons. Taking on an additional role that you enjoy might provide you with enough creative expression that makes your primary role more bearable.

You are considering a role change: There's nothing wrong with your role, but you think you will like another role on the team better. Rather than jump in, it might make sense to try it out part time to see if it works for you.

You genuinely have bandwidth: Maybe your team is self organized, motivated, hitting their milestones with clockwork regularity, is constantly delighting their customers, and you find yourself with time on your hands. This is a nice problem to have. In such cases, I would advise you to first see if you can help the team with their continuous improvement (yes, even the best teams can get better :-) ) or if feasible, help another team or even upgrade your role within the organization. If that were not an option, or if you genuinely think having a complementary skill is better, then taking on an additional role is a good option.

If You Have To, Here's How to Do It

So, if you find yourself in a position of having to take on another responsibility due to one or more of the above reasons, here's how I suggest you go about it:

1. Evaluate Team Maturity: Before you even think about picking up another role, consider the current maturity level of your Scrum team. A team that is new to scrum, or one that is facing issues delivering will need more support from you on an ongoing basis. You taking on another role to "help" can actually make things worse. However, if your team is autonomous, well-versed in Agile practices, and require less day-to-day guidance, you might be able to free up some bandwidth for other things.
2. Identify Team Needs: Assess the team's needs and any gaps in skills or resources. Your decision to take on extra responsibilities should be driven by a desire to fill these gaps and support the team's success.
3. Understand Your Skillset: Reflect on your skills and interests to determine which additional responsibilities you are well-suited to take on. Aligning these tasks with your strengths ensures you can add value without facing a steep learning curve.
4. Time Management: Critically evaluate your current workload and time commitments. Can you realistically take on more without sacrificing the quality of your work as a Scrum Master? Consider using time-tracking tools to gain insights into how you spend your time and identify potential areas for efficiency improvements.
5. Set Boundaries: If you decide to take on additional roles, it's crucial to establish clear boundaries and define how much time you'll allocate to these tasks. This clarity will help prevent role confusion and ensure your primary responsibilities as a Scrum Master are not neglected.
6. Communicate with Stakeholders: Discuss your intention with key stakeholders, including the development team, product owner, and management. Transparent communication ensures everyone understands your new roles and how they fit into the team's overall workflow.
7. Trial Period: Consider starting with a trial period for the additional responsibilities. This approach allows you to assess the impact on your core duties and the team's performance and adjust as necessary.
8. Regularly Reassess: Continuously monitor the situation to ensure that the added responsibilities are not negatively impacting your effectiveness as a Scrum Master or the team's productivity. Be prepared to adjust your commitments based on the team's evolving needs and your capacity.

Potential Pitfalls

Conflict of Interest: Certain roles have inherent Conflict of Interest with the SM role and are best avoided. For instance, the role of a Product Owner is to get the team to deliver maximum customer value at the highest quality with the least amount of time and cost. This means that the PO is more concerned about how much value the team is delivering, but not so much about whether they are at risk of burnout, or the technical debt is increasing, or team members are neglecting to spend their time reflecting on how they did the work and identifying how to become even better. They rely on a Scrum Master to do this for them. If an SM picks up the PO role, or as is more common, a PO is asked to pick up the SM role, this Conflict of Interest will rear its ugly head and can have a negative impact on the team. Rather than try to do a risky balancing act it is always best to keep these roles separate. Where it is not feasible, make sure you are mindful of the conflict of interest and capture objective data and consciously reflect on how you are executing both roles. (Journaling helps.) It also helps to have open channel of communications with all stakeholders so that they can freely communicate what they see to you. Same can be true of the Tech Lead role and Career Manager role for one or more of the team members.

Role Capture - Another risk you run when you handle multiple roles is that of Role Capture, where you find the new role to be equally or more appealing than your current role. This is normal and to a certain extent expected due to the novelty factor. But if this gets to the point where your SM duties are being compromised, you need to take action. If you really want to switch to the new role, and your team can afford a new Scrum Master, you should work with the team and the leadership to identify a replacement and transition to the new role. But if this is not an option (due to budgetary or other reasons ), then you will have to consciously block time for each role, and make sure you are doing justice to both roles. This is not an ideal situation, but use this opportunity to build deep skills and valuable contacts in the new role while you wait for the circumstances to change.

Poor fit/Low Interest in New Role - Sometimes you might find that you have low interest or ability in the new role. Under these circumstances, the right thing to do for both yourself and for the team is to divest yourself of the role. Executing a role where you have low interest or poor skills will not help the team and may even harm the team’s interests if someone else has to spend time cleaning up after you. If the situation is such that you have to contribute in two areas try to find another area to contribute in or buckle down and learn to like the new role / build your skills.

If you have read this far, I have a favor to ask. Have you got any experience executing multiple roles (as a Scrum Master or in any other role)? What was it like? What were some of the strategies that you used to be successful? If you failed, what lessons did you learn? Share in the comments below.