The Scrum Master Mission – teach the team how to interact with each other and with business representatives.
- One of the members of the development team becomes a scrum master.
- Responsible for adhering to Scrum practices and implementing values
- Conducts team meetings
- Supervises the team to implement its decisions
- Initiates the removal of obstacles hindering the team
- Protects the team from external influences
The Scrum Master is the keeper of SCRUM values and rituals.
Without him, the team can slip back onto the usual rails, and begin to violate the principles of team interaction, and processes. It can be said that the scrum master makes sure that everything goes according to the farmworker. And this happens primarily through his support of a relationship of trust, mutual assistance, and openness in the team.
This is not a separate “Working Position” that absolves all tasks. He is a member of the team, who may be chosen internally or appointed by external management. All of his primary time is spent working on the product, just like any other member of the team.
Example:
The company has adopted a scrum master rotation. Different team members took turns playing this role for one month at a time. This is especially useful when there are team members who are careless about scrum practices, work out of habit, and have little interaction with the rest of the team.
Imagine, yesterday a person spoke against the rules of the scrum, and today, turns out to be a scrum master himself, he has to enforce those rules and maintain teamwork principles.
Sometimes, what is needed is external control of the scrum master himself by the company management.
For example, the person is passionate about team discipline, and compliance with processes, but does not help maintain good relations in the team in any way. Such behavior is a purely technical understanding of scrum. And if you are familiar with the values of the Agile approach, which scrum shares, you know that “People and interaction are more important than processes and tools”. Therefore, first and foremost, the scrum master must be a good communicator.
You shouldn’t think that a SM has to tell you what to do to whom.
As we will see later, these issues are decided by the team collegially. He maintains order and the right attitude and takes care of the team. For example, if one of the team members has a broken chair, it is the scrum master who looks for where to buy a new one or addresses the issue with the company management by contacting the appropriate services.
“Removing obstacles to work” can be interpreted very broadly. For example, it happens that the scrum master, in addition to all his duties, regularly buys fruit and pizza for the team.”
The external influences from which the team must be protected are attempts to pull people from the team during an iteration in order to shut down “problems” in other important projects. Of course, you don’t need to protect the team by “military action. You need to discuss with company management or managers of other projects the issues between team interactions so that it doesn’t undermine the effectiveness of the teams. For example, the scrum assumes that the team composition does not change during iteration. However, it can be agreed that, if necessary, the right people can be transferred to another team after the iteration ends. Since sprint release cycles are very short, this may solve the issue.
If the product owner can be conventionally called an external interface with the customer, one of the tasks of the scrum master is to be an internal interface with the company.
The next article will tell you about the product backlog
