What a Scrum Master is Not

More often than other roles on a Scrum team, the Scrum Master position is plagued by the vagueness of job description that leaves it susceptible to taking on tasks not really fitting for the role. This article will explore what a Scrum Master doesn’t do in order to better help those understand what the job is really designed for (as well as ease the mind of current Scrum Masters who aren’t really sure of their day-to-day is aligned with traditional Scrum philosophies).

It’s human nature to want to see more tactile and quantifiable information. For instance, other roles on a Scrum team are much more aligned to be able to produce visible output. A developer has code they can show their colleagues at the end of a hard day. A QA tester can count the scenarios they’ve tested with very measured outcomes. The role of the Scrum Master is a bit more qualitative, however. Scrum Masters are the “Ring Leaders” of the Scrum Ceremonies- responsible for making sure stand-ups occur, sprint planning is handled and that the team is living by the values of Scrum, to name a few. These types of responsibilities are not always seen as tangible productivity to upper management or those that don’t understand agile and Scrum principles. It is difficult to measure that you coached a team member on how to work through a Poker Planning session or that another team member needed the motivation to finish a Sprint after expressing in the last retrospective lost confidence over a difficult deployment. These are the soft skills - mostly nonquantifiable-  that a Scrum Master faces every day.

If you are new to Scrum and aren’t sure how the Scrum Master should fill their day, here’s a brief list of things they should NOT be doing on a regular basis. Sure, once in a while to help out in a pinch might make sense, but if this is part of your Scrum Master’s daily routine, please give them a raise! They are doing far more than is required in most Scrum frameworks and most likely at the cost of actually doing their true responsibilities for the role and the team.

A Scrum Master should not regularly:

• Take meeting notes
• Send meeting invites for meetings that are not part of the Scrum ceremonies
• Talk much (if at all) in most Scrum Ceremonies
• Test applications/product/software
• Code
• Build detail reports
• Approve team members time off
• Work with any project budgets
• Micro-manage or make any large decisions on behalf of the team

It is easy to see why the Scrum Master role can be a confusing one - Scrum Masters are not actively contributing to a Sprint’s end physical product. Scrum Masters are simply facilitators in the Scrum ceremonies and motivators of the team to reach the Sprint goals. To complicate matters, many organizations are still trying to decide if each Agile team should have a full-time Scrum Master or if this position is one that can be part-time. If the role can’t fill a day’s work in some companies, it’s no wonder various tasks can get dumped on the team member with the greater bandwidth.

The combination of organizations either being new to (or not understanding) Scrum coupled with a more blurred job description for Scrum Masters can be a recipe for disaster. Often resulting in under-utilizing the expertise of the Scrum Master and/or causing burnout as they try to “fill their day” with tangible output like the rest of the team. However, it should be understood that Scrum Masters need the support of leaders in the organization who understand why the Scrum Master is valuable to the team. These leaders should support the Scrum Master to be able to focus all their energy on aligning the team with Agile and Scrum methodologies, just as a Product Owner should be focused on maximizing the value of their product. Or the development team on building the best software each iteration. If Scrum Masters are at all spending their hours focused on any of the above task items (and that's a small example!), it’s time to take a step back and re-evaluate Agile methodologies, Scrum team roles, and responsibilities. Additionally, focusing on how the organization or team is valuing the Scrum Master's time is essential to keeping the team healthy and delivering the best quality for the team, company, and end-user or product.