Scrum Master - Your Facilitator For Agile Product Delivery

The scrum master is someone who adapts to the Lean-Agile tools, practices with a purpose of understanding the team and increasing the spirit of the scrum - Quite a rendering statement! Which you must have seen in many posts/books/blogs. Obviously, I am saying nothing new by voicing this again. Therefore, what I really would like to focus in my blog is the effective leadership styles of a scrum master.

Mia Hamm describes the scrum master as,

"I am member of a team, and I rely on the team.

I defer to it and sacrifice for it, because the team, not the individual,

is the ultimate champion.”

The Science and Art of Scrum Mastery

A defined scrum master gets in tune with different circumstances, depending on the situation and context. They also fulfil the responsibility of enabling a culture where the Agile teams can flourish, thus leading to the team productivity.

The scrum master is also referred to the servant leader for the scrum teams by the Agile Manifesto. With self-motivation, the scrum master is entitled as the master at encouraging and motivating the team to realise their full potential. His other responsibilities as servant leader include:-

Building the team towards self-organisation.
Leading the team through various challenges.
Ensuring the Agile process and implementation.
Supporting the team to reach their full potential and ability.
Resolve the conflicts within the team for better teamwork and effective production.

A scrum master follows a creative and disciplined movement in different iterations for an incremental development. Through emphasising the self-organized behaviour, they play a key role in team collaborations and meeting the organisational goals.

The Scrum Master as a Changemaker

Projects and operational development have reached a sharp end, where all the requirements do not meet at the same time. During the completion stage, often the requirements would change (As per the customer/market demands). In such cases, a scrum master is made as a team facilitator who monitors the development process and also improves their engineering practices for continuous feedback and flexibility. Some of his their roles are:-

Conducts meetings for the team which includes Iteration planning, daily scrum, and iterative review.
Coaches team members by solving their difficulties in decision making and day to day operations.
Facilitates Continual learning about Agile and implementation of agile practices during the meetings.
Produces input on different user stories and product visions also sequence the product backlog items.
Helps the team in efficient production acting as a barrier for external distractions.

The Scrum Master as a Facilitator

Scrum master being the part of the development team organises equal and standard output from the team. Their prime responsibility involves project flow and product development in the agile team. Some of their other major responsibilities are:-

The scrum master is responsible for facilitating daily scrum, iteration planning, iteration demo and retrospective meetings.
They should possess scrum values of honesty and integrity as an effective communicative person who holds the team together.
A scrum master should be a decision maker in creating useful and practicable plans for agile software development.
They should have the ability to track and remove barriers of the team.

Conclusion

Scrum master plays a key role in scrum team for Agile based development in implementing different procedures for team success and product development. With the main focus of open communication for better productivity.

References

https://www.scrumalliance.org/community/articles/2013/november/an-introduction-to-scrum

http://agiletrail.com/2011/11/14/42-tasks-for-a-scrum-masters-job/

http://www.scaledagileframework.com/scrum-master/

http://www.yodiz.com/blog/scrum-master-job-descriptions-and-responsibilities-in-agile-methodology/

Also join us in Bangalore, India for SAFe® Scrum Master with SSM Certification

When: Saturday, Feb 11th, 2017 at 9:00 am