A Competent Scrum Master Is Someone Who Does “Nothing” – Part 2

In the previous article we learnt about the roles and responsibilities of a Scrum Master (SM). The question was, how do we know if a SM is competent since he is not involved in the actual product delivery? There are indeed few methods we can consider, measuring through improving results, application of Agile tools and team evaluation.

Measure through improving result: Most visible performance indicator is the improvement of team result. By examining the delivery situation of the team, with and without the Scrum Mater, tells you much value the SM has injected to the process. The delivery situation mentioned here refers to indicators such as user story delivery cycle, overall project on-time delivery rate, and product user satisfaction rather than measures like lines of code per person or bug rate per thousand lines of code.

During the initial stage of agile transformation, it may be difficult to see significant progress. At the beginning the Scrum Master needs to help the team identify problems, such as why there are many bugs after the project is launched and what causes them. They should also guide on how to improve in the future and track improvement status. After several iterations, if the Scrum Master’s guidance for the team is effective, user satisfaction with the product should increase; at the same time, delivery cycles will gradually shorten and stabilize.

Measure through application of Agile Tools: When we talk about tools, it’s not about using a tool to record and manage the daily work of the Scrum Master. It refers to the artifacts used by the team in their daily work, such as Daily Standup, Kanban, User Stories, Burn Down charts, etc. By observing how the team uses these tools, one can indirectly reflect the effectiveness of the Scrum Master’s coaching. If Scrum Master is not taken seriously in daily work, this can lead to disruptions in the work, and the tools will often look messy or even missing.

Measure through team evaluation: A team under the care of a competent Scrum Master usually have a good team atmosphere. You can also find out what the team thinks about the Coach by interviews and / or questionnaires.

When the team agility is truly developed, the self-organized team will “auto-pilot” in all the Scrum Ceremonies, PI planning, Daily Standup, Sprint review and retrospective, and backlog refinement. At this stage our Scrum Master can gradually move on to incubate a new team. It is a long and complex process to transform towards agility The hardest thing to change is the mindset, and that’s the work for every Scrum Master.