Anti Pattern – Change Scrum Master often

Changing the Scrum Master role within the team is something that I hear time to time. Fortunately not that often. The defenders of this theory claim this is beneficial for the team and for the different team members. They think if people change the role of Scrum Master all team can understand what are the difficulties and challenges of a Scrum Master and therefore be more understandable with colleagues.

Another reason that I heard recently had to do with the fact that scrum masters were part of a central team, and having them rotating between teams would improve their knowledge sharing within the central team. In my opinion this does not make any sense. First I do not agree at all with central teams composed of coaches or scrum masters, you can see my view in this blog post: “Nightmare – Central teams consisting of coaches“. Second I could already see how both scrum masters and teams would be frustrated in changing teams every couple of weeks.

Some people argues these ideas are possible because the role of scrum masters is to make himself disposable therefore if teams do not need them they can change place. In my opinion this argument is strange, of course scrum master role is to make himself disposable but to reach that level the team must be quite mature. And if the team reaches that level scrum master is not necessary at all therefore there is no need for rotation because there is not even need for scrum master.

The basic idea behind all these suggestions relies on the fact that people feel the need to share knowledge. In this point we are align, I truly believe that knowledge sharing is something important, I have wrote a blog about it. I defend if you do not create a knowledge transfer culture you will die, more details here. So in order to share knowledge you have several ways, this blog post present you several of them.

The big problem of this idea relies on the fact that every time a person within a team change the interaction between peoples change. People that are aware of the four phases of a team: The Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing, know that these phases are all necessary and inevitable in order for the team to grow, to face challenges, to tackle problems, to find solution, to plan work and to deliver work. Every time a person change within the team the team goes back on these four phases, forcing some kid of reset to the team.

I hope that I was able to explain why changing scrum master often causes problems to the teams.

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