What does a Scrum Master?

What does a Scrum master the whole day? Are you just a fancy administrator or are you actively removing impediments? Do you coach your teams toward mastery?

Too often Scrum masters become Scrum administrators. They schedule meetings, moderate discussions, write progress reports and draw beautiful slides how to improve the organization. Or worst they collect extensive statistics about velocity, planned versus delivered story points or how precise story estimation was.

At the end of the day your job is to mentor your team to be champions and build awesome products. Wake up! You are not a project manager, you shall be a catalyst.

Facets of a Scrum Master

• Be a servant leader whose focus is on the needs of the team members and those they serve (the customer), with the goal of achieving results in line with the organization’s values, principles, and business objectives,
• Teach to ensure agile, lean, Scrum and other approaches are understood and enacted,
• Mentor to transfer agile knowledge and experience to the team, and concentrate on continuous improvement, 
• Coach the individual with a focus on mindset and behaviour,
• Help the organization to truly collaborate with the Scrum team,
• Be an impediment remover solving blocking issues to the team’s progress, taking into account the self-organizing capabilities of the development team,
• Facilitate by setting the stage and providing clear boundaries in which the team can collaborate,
• Be a change agent to enable a culture in which Scrum teams can flourish,

Remember the definition of an agile or Scrum team. Ask yourself if your team fulfill this definition. If not work hard to improve. Each team is 

1. self-managing, 
2. cross-functional and customer-focused, 
3. co-located, 
4. long-lived.

Scrum Master Tasks

• Remove impediments
• Evangelise agile, lean values and principles
• Moderate Scrum meetings - do not forget to regulate delegate moderation to your team -
• Gently transform your department and organization to become more agile
• Remove yearly evaluation, practice bi-weekly face2face meetings
• Remove individual bonus, either introduce team bonuses or better remove extrinsic motivators
• Remove test and quality department, move the specialists to the Scrum teams

You shall by all means avoid administrative waste such as

• Writing information in Word documents or in Wiki that nobody actively uses,
• Writing multiple times the same information,
• Writing status information instead of publishing it on the team board. The board shall be the information radiator of your product development. Do not create head sinks in documents,
• Holding meetings with one person projecting their notebook screen content and all other attendees looking at it -.

Tips and Tricks

• Face2Face - Prefer physical meetings to all other communication medium. Use video conference and chatting tools to feel the mood of your team,
• Emergent - Good enough to try it, Safe enough to do it. Do not look for the perfect solution before trying a new approach,
• Plan Do Check Act - PDCA -. Embrace complex systems and try new approaches to improve your team. Focus on external and internal quality,
• Process ownership to keep it alive. You are not in charge of the team processes, the team is,
• Community of practices - PoC -is an effective way to move your team to technical excellence.

If you are new to the role read "The Great Scrum Master" from Zuzana Šochová. A more extensive list of books can be found here.