A Competent Scrum Master Is Someone Who Does “Nothing” – Part 1

As we all know, the Scrum Master (SM, or Agile Coach) is a servant leader who does not participate in daily development work such as writing code and fixing bugs. So what exactly does a Scrum Master do? How should the performance be evaluated?

First of all, we need to understand what are the responsibilities of a Scrum Master. They are generally understood as follows:

Coach: The Scum Master acts as an agile coach, observing the team’s daily work and providing guidance to both the development team and the Product Owner (PO) to ensure that everyone understands and adheres to the scrum ceremonies.

Servant Leader: Unlike traditional managers or project managers, the Scrum Master does not command the teams or have control over their work. Instead, they serve the scrum team by ensuring that necessary resources and support are provided for successful delivery.

Process Authority: It is important for the entire team to understand the value of agility, and it’s the responsibility of the SM to make sure this happens. They should be able to facilitate continuous improvement in the way the team works, so that business values can be maximized.

Shield: The Scrum Master should protect the team from external interference so that they can focus on delivering value. For example, if a product manager wants to insert new requirements into an iteration, the Scum Master needs to assess whether the requirement should be inserted and, if that’s the case, which requirement should be replaced.

“Road Sweeper”: The Scrum Master helps the team to clear any obstacles encountered in delivery, for example if a cluster is needed for the development environment and the creation is out of the team’s permission, the Scrum Master will coordinate with respective team to get it done.

Change Agent: Unlike the traditional mindset, Agile principle embraces changes, and the first thing to change is the mindset. The Scrum Master must actively promote agility, make teams and organizations aware of the importance and necessity of transformation, and show them the benefits of value delivery.

If you still remember: The main responsibility of the Scrum Master is to promote agility within the team, but they do not write code or documents required by the project. In other words, there is no product output, how do we measure the performance of a Scrum Master when he/she is doing “nothing”.

Those who enjoy watching soccer games must know someone who never touched the field in the match but essential to the win – the coach. The Scrum Master is the coach to the team that leads everyone to success. We will not criticize a soccer coach who can’t perform a shot, he is justified by the result. Likewise, there are various way to evaluate our Scrum Masters. We will continue the topic in the following article.