The Rotating Scrum Master

Scrum masters have hectic days. In the morning, you could work with the development team by facilitating a difficult decision, de-escalating a growing conflict between team members, or providing some guidance on technical excellence in an agile world. In the afternoon, you could help the product owner craft the vision for their product, understand how to write clear product backlog items, or grasp what value means in the product owner’s context. Your day could wrap up in a meeting with HR as you discuss team-based incentives instead of individual performance reviews as a means to improve agility.

Clearly, the Scrum master is a busy person who needs a specialized skill set to succeed. The Scrum master is an observer. Your job is to watch the team: how they work and interact with one another. You also keep an eye on how the outside organization is interacting with the Scrum team.

When Scrum is new to an organization and a Scrum master hasn’t been hired yet, many teams try to fill the role by rotating individuals into it each sprint. Filling a short-term need with a rotational Scrum master can work until the team hires someone full-time, but rotating the role isn’t a long-term solution.

If you rotate the Scrum master role, you’re assuming that anyone can fill that role. But there are specific skills that a Scrum master brings to a team, and these skills require time and focus to develop. If the Scrum master role is consistently rotated, you can’t home in on many of the social cues, bits of information, and opportunities that can allow you to help and provide feedback.

Joe asks:

Does a Scrum master need technical skills?

According to The Scrum Guide, no, and in some cases, technical skills could be a distraction—especially if the Scrum master finds the technical work more interesting than coaching, facilitating, training, mentoring, removing impediments, and the organizational change that comes with the job.

On the other hand, technical skills could be a benefit to a Scrum master. If the Scrum team is stuck on a technical decision, the Scrum master could pick up on the issue sooner if he or she has some development experience. But the development team owns the “how” of building the product, and they have all the skills needed within the team to deliver the work.

Being a Scrum master requires so many different skills that technical proficiency belongs near the bottom of the list of things to look for when evaluating candidates.

A rotating Scrum master will make sure that the Scrum events are held but will they understand why? Is self-organization being preserved? What about impediments? With the Scrum master role switching hands regularly, what’s the incentive to work through impediments that are beyond the team’s capability to resolve?

Consider the Scrum values in the context of the Scrum master role:

• Commitment: A Scrum master is committed to servant leadership. You lead through influence, not titles. Your commitment is to the Scrum framework and to ensuring that the Scrum team enacts and understands the rules.

• Focus: The focus of a Scrum master is on the team’s ability to self-organize around their work. When self-organization is present, teams are empowered to do their best possible work. You’re focused on fostering a collaborative culture and helping facilitate the team through healthy conflict and difficult situations.

• Courage: Being a Scrum master is scary sometimes. There are things you’ll do to protect your teams that won’t always feel safe. You have to act courageously and say no to practices that harm the team. Sometimes it will take courage to speak truth to power. Lean on your courage to act transparently when serving the Scrum team and wider organization.

• Respect: As a Scrum master, you’re working with people who might be scared of the change you’re leading. Always be respectful to those people. Respect their past work, their successes, and where they are today in their journey of learning and enacting Scrum.

• Openness. Scrum masters are open about the things they observe and their feelings about how things are going, but they’re also open to feedback from the team.

Can you, when you rotate into the Scrum master role occasionally, live up to the Scrum values? Probably not. What happens when times are tough and deadlines are looming? Do you abandon your Scrum master duties and instead act as a member of the dev team by lending your coding skills where they’re most needed? Or do you embrace the Scrum master role and try to help teams look holistically at their system of work, and inspect and adapt as needed?

Scrum does one of two things for your team and organization:

• Empowers your team to deliver valuable products by the end of each sprint.

• Shows you why you currently can’t deliver valuable products each sprint.

When the latter happens and the Scrum team and the organization need help, a dedicated Scrum master can make all the difference. The role is designed for coaching, facilitating, teaching, mentoring, and training people and teams on how to deliver. You are the defender of transparency; you help create opportunities for the product owner to make new and interesting decisions when new information becomes available.

Considering the cost of not being able to deliver—or perhaps even worse, delivering the wrong thing at the wrong time, for the wrong customer—the cost of a full-time Scrum master suddenly seems like a bargain.

Not convinced? Let’s see if we can more precisely quantify the value of a Scrum master. When an organization first hires a Scrum master, they do have an initial decrease in revenue (they have to pay the person, after all). This initial expense is one of the most common reasons organizations give for not hiring a full-time Scrum master. But this decision is short-sighted.

The Scrum master has three levels of service: to the product owner, development team, and the organization. Let’s examine each of these in turn.

Your service to the product owner begins with helping the PO effectively manage the product backlog. This includes creating PBIs that are ordered by business value. The techniques and practices this vary, but the time you spend doing this helps the PO optimize business value. You’re also responsible for teaching the product owner how to plan product releases and get a return on their investment. Done well, serving the product owner contributes directly to increased profits.

The development team needs your help, too. Scrum masters remove impediments, teach technical and team skills, preserve self-organization, break down silos, encourage collaboration, point out technical-debt issues, and facilitate the Scrum events. The result: a more effective development team.

Finally, you also serve the organization. By providing Agile coaching to the organization, you can look at the big picture of not only how your team does their work, but also at how the wider organization impacts your team. You spot the issues and impediments both inside and outside the Scrum team that make product delivery more difficult. By fixing these issues you are raising the effectiveness of your Scrum teams. As the number of effective teams in your organization increases, the value that these teams deliver is likely to grow as well.

If someone is only a part-time Scrum master, do you think it’s really possible for them to perform these three levels of service in a way that makes a meaningful impact on the organization? Probably not. Organizations that use a part-time Scrum master likely won’t realize the full value and potential of a high-performing Scrum team.

The simple solution is to hire a professional Scrum master to serve your teams. If you can’t do that, find someone in your organization who’s committed to the Scrum values and servant leadership. Get them the training they need and support them as they learn how to be a professional Scrum master. But please, don’t set up your Scrum teams for failure by not appreciating the value of a full-time Scrum master.