Essential Skills for a Scrum Master

Essential Skills for a Scrum Master

What skills should we look for while selecting/hiring a Scrum Master or Team Coach (a framework-agnostic term)?

Recently, I posted this question on LinkedIn and asked fellow Agile experts to select top five skills that they consider essential from the list of ten commonly expected skills below:

  1. Product/Domain knowledge
  2. Hands-on technical expertise - Java, .Net, mobile programming, etc.
  3. Knowledge of tools - Jira, VersionOne, etc.
  4. Facilitation Skills - encouraging participation from all, balancing participation, building consensus, etc.
  5. Process knowledge (#Agile, #Scrum, #Kanban, etc.)
  6. Practical Agile experience - any agile process/framework
  7. Positivity (positive attitude, positive energy and positive language)
  8. Rapport building skills
  9. Analytical skills - ability to understand new and complex topics, ability to integrate multiple ideas.
  10. Experience interacting with Client and senior management

You can find the original post here.

I was happy to see good overall response to the post. My sincere thanks to all who responded.

There was a good variety of responses, some almost the opposite of one another, but I could sense some pattern in there. While I did not intend this to be a formal survey, given that there were enough responses, I thought of analysing the data.

Below is how the Scrum Master skills would rank based on the list of about 40 expert responses:

Quick notes:

  • To keep it simple, only those votes were counted that mentioned the original list of skills I shared.
  • Some individuals shared the list of more than 5 skills. Only the first skills were taken into consideration.
  • Weighted score is based on: score of 10 for the first skill selected by an individual, 9 for second skill, and so on.

Personally, I would agree with this list quite a bit. While it is a collection of some 40 random responses and does not follow a structured sampling technique, I think it captures the essential skills for a Scrum Master in a very meaningful manner.

I think more than the ranking, it is important to understand the relevance of each skill, which sometimes might vary depending on a particular context. I am sharing below my opinion categorizing each skill as 'must have', 'should have' or 'could have' (or nice to have):

=> Positivity (positive attitude, language and demeanour)

- Must have. In my experience, a skeptic (or negative) person will be quite ineffective in Scrum Master role, no matter how knowledgeable or experienced.

=> Analytical skills

- Must have. This combined with Positivity gives you a person who is eager to learn and adapts quickly.

=> Facilitation Skills

- Must have: if sourcing from outside.

- Should have: if sourcing internally, but must have good communication skills so they can learn facilitation skills quickly.

=> Process Knowledge (#Agile, #Scrum, #Kanban, etc.)

- Must have in depth knowledge on at least one process

- Should have knowledge on multiple frameworks

=> Practical Agile Experience

- Must have if you are sourcing from outside

- Should have if you are sourcing it internally

=> Rapport Building Skills

- Must have. Somewhat overlaps with Positivity.

=> Knowledge of tools - Jira, VersionOne, etc.

- Should have exposure to at least one tool to speed up the learning curve

=> Hands-on Technical Expertise 

- Must have if you want the SM to work as individual contributor or play the role of architect also (All the best!!)

- Could have if you are looking for a full time Scrum Master (an enabler)

=> Product/Domain Knowledge 

- Could have

=> Experience interacting with Client and senior management

- Not needed. If the person has other 'must have' skills, they should be able to interact comfortably with any human being, including customers and senior management. ;-)

Hope you find some value in this quick analysis of Scrum Master skills. Look forward to hear your thoughts...

Mark Bower

Intrapreneur & Innovator | I help companies create better products faster | Training, coaching & consulting. ?? PM me.

6 年

Your a Scrum Master now! Who knew? Great stuff. Such a good way to work isn't it?

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Poonam Bhatia

Lead - QA l Practitioner Shift LEFT l SAFe 4.0 & Certified ScrumMaster? l Lending Products -Home Loan, Personal Loan, Overdraft & Credit Card. Payments - xBoarder, OSKO, Insurance, Healthcare l Azure DevOps I AU Citizen

6 年

Good work done and considering dynamic nature of every project some have’s might rank up or down but overall it does make lot of sense ??

Bob Jacobs

Experienced agile practitioner

6 年

Sanjay Kumar: "Should have exposure to at least one tool to speed up the learning curve" -- so a Scrum Master who has been able to manage perfectly well in teams without a tool such as Jira would be at a disadvantage? Dependency on tools is seen as a good thing?

Claus Reestrup

Visionary Human Potential Catalyst | Personal and Professional Growth with AI | Agile Transformation Leader | Storyteller

6 年

Jeppe Agerbo this might come in handy?

Sanjay Kumar

Agile Transformation Coach, Enterprise Agile Coach, Author

6 年

Friends, I have reworked the later part of the article, categorizing skills as 'must have', 'should have' and 'could have'. Please review if it makes better sense. Thanks!

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