Scrum Master: The Legend Continues (Part I)
Nikola Bogdanov
Organizational Change, Transformation, and Business Agility Coach ??15+ yrs coached 280+ teams, 45+ companies in IT and diverse industries.??Speaker, Academic Lecturer, Podcasteer & Trainer.??Passionate about Agile.
One evening last year I had a class in Sofia University, there was a classroom full of young and eager to learn students, most of them already working in different IT companies… As I was going to speak on a conference on the next day and the topic was regarding the Scrum Master maturity growth, we decided it’s a good idea to train the talk together. I could have practiced and they would have had an interesting lecture. After I presented all the cool stuff I had prepared, I was curious about the feedback and what the students had understood about the evolution of a Scrum Master, but at some point a student very honestly asked me:
“Hm, ok! But really, what do you do the whole day?”
In the eve after, I quickly added some slides reffering to my actual work activities… And I realized this is an important aspect, to make it clear what I do and how my job adds value to the others. And here I am, a year later I’m writing an article.
For the sake of simplicity, we will focus the article in team context, but we can extrapolate almost everything from the team to individual or organizational levels.
Always start with the "Why?"
The Scrum Master’s purpose is to be enabler for the team. His main goal is to help the team evolve and become high-performing and high-productive. Note, I intentionally used “evolve” and not “build” as the true Scrum Master can’t build the team according to his vision. He can only support the team’s growth in positive direction. Think of the Scrum Master as a parent, who guides, influences and protects his children, but at the end of the day it’s a matter of unique evolution of the individual.
The team is full of experts in domains, like software engineering, quality assurance, software architecture, etc. The Scrum Master must become an expert in everything outside these domains, for instance: inter-team dynamics, organizational systems and facilitation. One more team member gives you one more expert in engineering practices. Having a Scrum Master means there is a person dedicated on everything no one is expert in. Detailed description of the role you can find in the Scrum Guide by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Swaber. (Link)
Full Article in my Blog: https://www.agilepool.com/scrum-master-one/