Scrum master

Main responsibilities;

• Organize and conduct sprint planning meetings, sprint retrospectives, product demos and daily scrums.
• Partner with Product Owners to achieve high-quality and timely deliverables based on highest business value.
• Manage sprint planning and execution, including providing clear visibility into sprint status.
• Participate in release planning and scheduling by providing scrum team statistics, identifying project dependencies, and creating velocity forecasts.
• Ensure high throughput of development teams by identifying and mitigating potential issues and roadblocks.
• Work with project stakeholders ensure product backlog is prioritized, groomed, and detailed to avoid any downtime, ambiguity or rework.
• Facilitate issue resolution within team, including sheltering scrum team from outside influences or diversions.
• Assist with backlog maintenance and prioritization of incident resolution
• Coach scrum team members in making appropriate commitments through story selection and task definition
• Create and maintain sprint and release burndowns, velocity metrics and projections, and forecasts in order to demonstrate visibility and enable timely adjustments.

Scrum Master Goals

The scrum master focuses on the process and aims to:

• maximize flow;
• minimize lead time;
• optimize the whole—that is, avoids sub-optimization.

In Dutch, you might say:

• van rietje naar ring;
• van waterval naar wendbaar™; en
• van schokken naar stromen™.

The scrum master's goals are:

• to make him or herself obsolete by making the team(s) competent and autonomous;
• to help reach the individual, group and organization reach its full potential;
• maximize flow and minimize lead time.

Key Succes Factors

For success, a scrum master must be:

Daily Scrum

As scrum master, your primary goals during the daily scrum include:

Scrum Master Excellence

As scrum master…

You ought to	Excel in rich modes of communication. …actively engage in conversation, preferable face-to-face or on the phone. Use e-mail as a last resort.
	Facilitate the team and process as a whole}}. …look at the big picture, not just the team. Facilitate the team, lead by setting the right context.
	Limit yourself primairily to process. …the team excels in mastery in their profession. You only have to make sure everyone uses the right process and celebrates the right ceremonies. The product owner will take care of the what, why, when and for whom.
	Shield the team from management and stakeholders. …Maintaining flow in the development teams means that you block interrupts, keep managers, sales and marketeers out of the way and never interrupt an interrupt.
	Represent the development teams towards the product owner on the minimal technical product quality requirements. …a smooth information flow between all stakeholders, especially the product owner keeps things oiled an cranks up velocity.
	Jointly with product owner define scope. …and invite any other qualified team member to hammer out required details during grooming meeting to get product backlog items ready to build.
	Inform product owner about progress. …the product owner not only has the need to know, but also has the right to know about anything that may influence planning.
	Be the central point of contact for the product owner and other stakeholders. …acting as a gatekeeper and/or a public character helps you shield the team from management and stakeholders.
	Help the product owner to align his or her activities with those of the development teams. …
	Collaborate with the product owner on defining the definitions of ready to build and ready to ship. …clear, complete, consistent checklists both at the start and the end of each sprint act as self-reinforcing quality filters. Tighten them up whenever you can, yet always with the consent of product owner and development team.
	Keep an accelerator list. …also know as impediment list, make sure to proactively keep a list of anchors that keeps the teams from reaching full velocity. Implement an accelerator by lifting these anchors one by one, since lifting the top one changes the order in the list.
You ought not to	Create or assign tasks …the development team members know how to split up product backlog items into smaller tasks. Just make sure that they do and that tasks can be completed in a single workday.
	Manage anyone’s work …autonomy, mastery and purpose is what drives the development team. Make sure you facilitate this and get out of the way.
	Be the single point of contact …make yourself redundant, obsolete over time. Teach team members to take over your job. Make them fully autonomous.
You should	tbs ...
You should not	tbs …

Sources

• Inspect & Adapt » Geoff Watts » Towards a Definition of a Great ScrumMaster
• Think Different » Bob Marshall » The Universal Scrum Master Failure
• Think Different » Bob Marshall » The Scrum Master Role Is a Huge Waste of Human Potential
• Mountain Goat Software » Mike Cohn » Advice for Interviewing ScrumMasters
• InfoQ » Shane Hastie » The Scrum Master who Sold his Authority