Scrum Mastery

by Geoff Watts

feel great sympathy for many of the people who find themselves in the ScrumMaster role as it is very difficult, often misunderstood and there is very little specific guidance on how to perform the role well. They are also often swimming against the tide of traditional management techniques from the 20th century, which are not fit for today’s age of rapid change and complexity.

I don’t think I have ever come across a job role that has been so popular yet simultaneously derided; so simple yet so misunderstood; so common- sense and yet so revolutionary as the ScrumMaster.

A ScrumMaster is part facilitator, part coach and part coordinator. They are also part parent, part orchestra conductor and part sheepdog. And much, much more. The ScrumMaster should do whatever is needed to help the team become high performing and for the organisation to deliver excellent products quickly.

A ScrumMaster should serve the product owner, the development team and the organisation in various ways, most notably in facilitation, impediment removal and coaching. This

Servant-leaders serve first and then come to lead.

acronym RE-TRAINED.

One of the first things to learn about the ScrumMaster role is that it holds no authority.

ScrumMasters are expected to embody Scrum values and principles, facilitate the adoption of the process, guide the growth of the team and act as change agents for the organisation—all with no real formal power.

in order to be effective as a ScrumMaster it is imperative to earn the respect not only of the team but also of influential people within the organisation. Great ScrumMasters have good relationships with the tea...

it makes a certain amount of sense for the ScrumMaster to be chosen by the team.

Scrum introduces (or makes explicit) a lot of uncertainty—around requirements, process, hierarchy, and job descriptions amongst other things—so having someone you can rely on is highly desirable.

making the role of ScrumMaster for this team unnecessary. Create such a high-performing, self-organising team, with such a good relationship with the product owner, with such a keen understanding of the Scrum framework (and the principles behind the framework) that they don’t need any facilitation (of either process or people) and have no impediments left to remove.

Shu-Ha-Ri or The Hairy Shoe

“There is something you should understand about the way I work. When you need me but do not want me, then I must stay. When you want me but no longer need me, then I have to go. It’s rather sad, really, but there it is.”

great ScrumMasters take a viral approach: slow enough to not get destroyed by the host organisation but quick enough to gather momentum and instigate structural change within the corporate DNA.

All plans are arguably wrong anyway because, as soon as they are made, the information used to make them is immediately out of date.

Attempting to encourage, pressure or bribe the team into reducing the release plan will almost certainly lead to the team either consciously or sub-consciously cutting quality and introducing technical debt.

“The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.”

While we must sometimes make short-term compromises for long-term gains, great ScrumMasters know when it is imperative to take a stand on principle for the sake of the long-term agility, performance and integrity of the organisation.

Organisations that compromise the integrity of their products—and working at an unrealistic or unsustainable pace is the quickest way to do this—will soon accumulate technical debt that slows down their performance.

it comes to it, people are either unskilled at, unprepared for, or unwilling to take good, proper, helpful feedback.

AID model, which

“What I like about that idea is...”

potential feedback tool is The Perfection Game, as described in the Core Protocols

To remove impediments, ScrumMasters need to understand (or learn) how things get done in the organisation. Knowing whose door to knock on when an issue arises or what channels are most effective in gaining traction (and resolution) is often critical to a ScrumMaster’s, and team’s, success.

daily scrum is a buzzer. at any time, if a speaker is being too vague, too detailed, using jargon, or generally not giving the team the information it needs, any one of their team-mates will activate the buzzer to bring the speaker back on track.

“Pairing to help each other learn and get new members up to speed is what we do.”

A team that feels comfortable with each other and their ScrumMaster has the potential to reach a truly high-performing state.

So how agile is your team? Are they in Shu? Ha? Ri? How do you know? Should we even care?

traditional maturity models and ways of measuring teams do not map to the world in which agile teams operate— or if they do, they at least reduce the effectiveness of agile teams,

The team change their process in order to improve; they require no facilitation to manage their own impediments/conflict (perhaps entering “Ri”)

ScrumMasters are expected to embody the Scrum principle of The Art Of The Possible – making the best of each and every situation in order to move the team and the organisation forward.

Great ScrumMasters are not loose cannons constantly railing against their organisations. They pick their confrontations carefully and are prepared to accept certain compromises in order to have the opportunity to continue the battle another day.

However, the ScrumMaster also has a responsibility to foster relationships between the product owner and the development team, to promote transparency, trust and a sense of “one team.”

collaborative leaders “take away the blame” by helping shift conversations away from finding blame towards finding solutions and, if necessary, shouldering any blame yourself.

Try starting the daily scrum (or retrospective) with a short confessions session, where everyone (even neutral observers) shares a short example of something they screwed up.

Creating a process of gradual exposure is also a common pattern that great ScrumMasters tend to follow.

Daily scrums and retrospectives start off as behind-closed-doors or off-site meetings. As the team grows comfortable with each other, they can extend an invitation to the product owner —

list out what you think we could gain from having a longer sprint and also what you think we could gain from a shorter sprint, say two weeks long.”

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” and this has been hailed as a humorous truism ever since.

What teams should never do, however, is extend the sprint, not even by just a couple of days. The rhythm of delivery is far too important to compromise and it is a terrible precedent to set.

also reinforces the lack of authority in the ScrumMaster role.

“The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource.”

Great ScrumMasters are proactive, pioneering and they hate monotony. They typically adopt the attitude that things are possible no matter how difficult they may appear and are constantly looking for new ways to engage their team and to inspire curiosity

Many resourceful ScrumMasters broaden their perspectives and find new solutions by imagining what would make a problem worse, as opposed to better.

Knowing how things get done within the company, how impediments get resolved and who to go and speak to about certain issues is one of the factors that separate the good ScrumMasters from the great.

Remember that teams need space to be creative and proactive— they can’t and won’t do so if they are overloaded—so ensure your team is working at a sustainable pace.

One simple thing to consider is the amount of work taken into the sprint. The more space a team has, the more creative they are likely to be, so try to leave a little space in each sprint for creative problem solving.

help new ScrumMasters get used to asking meaningful and helpful questions, the ORID structure [26] offers a useful way of structuring their inquiry.

The aim here is to gather some facts about the situation without interpreting or analysing them.