Wat does a Scrum Master?

Recently, I have been ask by a manager from another organization within the company: what does a Scrum Master? And how to measure how good a Scrum Master (hear KPI, promotion, year end bonus,..)?

Note that manager knows nothing about Scrum nor Agile, has never worked even remotely with a Scrum team. She has asked a lot of people around her and get a lot of different answers that brought more confusion than clarity.

"It is like a project manager but for Scrum. But he or she can't tell people what to do." "It is the guy who update Jira and produce status report for management" "It is the guy who write the user stories" "It is a bit like a tech lead" These are some of the responses she got. Confusing to say the least. And, for anyone familiar with Scrum, completely wrong.

So I said to myself, let's try to correct her understanding and put down what a Scrum Master is. I could go with the Scrum Guide definition, it is actually very clear and well written. But I figured out I needed something a bit different that she could understand and put in context.

I decided to use the logical levels approach so that we can differentiate what value the Scrum Master brings to the team, what skillset he or she needs, what is he/she doing and so on. Here is a stab at defining the Scrum Master role:

• Purpose or Mission should be shared across the team so it can be something like: Delivering the maximum value in the minimum time, delighting customers and users.
• Identity: The Scrum Master is a Servant Leader to the team that aims to help the team continuously improving.
• Value:

1. Responsible for team’s adoption of Scrum and practice of it. Provide real-time guidance and leadership.
2. Humble: does not look for individual success but to help the team be successful.
3. Ensure a collaborative culture exists within the team and call out inappropriate behavior.
4. Committed to the success of the team, making any possible effort to remove impediments, being with the team from the beginning to the end of the project.
5. Influential: without being in a “command and control” mode, the Scrum Master leverages his expertise, experience and the trust he built to influence others to try and adopt agile and Scrum practices. He also extend his influence outside the team to influence management, stakeholders and peers.
6. Knowledge: the Scrum Master brings knowledge to the table in terms of Agile, Scrum, Transformation, Individual and team coaching/mentoring, technical practices and business agility. When he/she does not have the knowledge himself/herself, he/she can identify the gap and bring external experts to the team to close that gap.

• Skills:

1. Agile (not only Scrum) knowledge, understanding and actual experience.
2. Agile and growth mindset, living by the agile values.
3. Training skills.
4. Organizational skills: the ability to identify areas of improvement for the team and come up with solutions.
5. Technical familiarity: no need to be an expert or developer but there should be a minimum knowledge to be able to understand the team and their impediments, and propose technical/DevOps practices that can help the team.
6. Coaching abilities at the individual and team level: ability to ask powerful questions, help individuals understand the why and how, drive individual and team growth.
7. Conflict resolution: very often the SM will be caught in conflicts within the team or between the team and stakeholders. SM here is key to conflict resolution, ensuring everyone is align on the end goal and can find common ground to resolve issues, avoiding people to become frustrated and having resentment as we are all in for the long term.
8. Servant leader: be successful through the success of others, always look for others before self, lead by example.

• Actions/activities:

1. Train team and stakeholders on Scrum and Agile.
2. Facilitate Scrum events/ceremonies.
3. Observing the team working, giving direct feedback to team or individual when appropriate, otherwise bringing observations during Sprint retrospective.
4. Shielding the team from interruptions during the sprint
5. Removing obstacles that affect the team
6. Leading Product Owner to maintain product backlog quality
7. Walking the product owner through more technical user stories
8. Encouraging collaboration between the Scrum team and product owner
9. Coaching/Mentoring team towards high efficiency.

• Environment:

1. SM works on a daily basis with team members and PO.
2. When appropriate SM engages with the business, stakeholders, management and other teams to help remove any impediment.
3. Uses communication tools appropriately (In-person, phone, email, Skype/Teams)
4. Uses Jira as the primary tool for needs to be built and what is being built.

I hope this will help her understand what does a Scrum Master does and what skills are needed. However, this probably does not answer her question regarding how to assess a good Scrum Master. Actually, most of the activities I have listed are hard to evaluate if we read them through our traditional lens of KPIs based evaluation.

So what I told her is first we measure performance as a team first by how much value they bring to the business or customers. If your team delivers a lot of value and delights customers then you probably have a good(enough) Scrum Master or the outcome of the team would not be that good.

Then, if you have troubles with the team performance and want to deep dive to see how the Scrum Master is doing, you need to understand really the team dynamics and what the Scrum Master is doing in detail. Forget traditional way of measuring the work by looking at how many hours the person work VS number of "things" delivered (VS quality of the "things" - not even always measured). I recommended her to get domain experts such as Agile coaches to help her. We have actually an agile maturity model that helps us assess how a team is performing and identifying opportunities for improvement, including Scrum Master. We can also spend time with the team to see how the team members work together and what can be done differently. Finally, most importantly, I told her that evaluating Scrum Master performance should be done for a good reason i.e. identifying potential improvement areas and, as a leader, coming up with a plan to help the Scrum Master performs better in his or her role.

This is my take at what a Scrum Master does and how we can assess how good he or she is at the job. What's yours?