Scrum Master between effect and ineffectiveness

From colourful sticky notes to real value creation with the help of the Scrum Master

Scrum is one of the best-known agile frameworks. Since it was first mentioned several decades ago, it has stood its ground against numerous other approaches and today often provides the basic knowledge for agile practices. Scrum continues to play a central role, especially in IT.

But what defines the Scrum Master in this context? The barriers to entry are low: an unprotected professional title, a two-day basic seminar with certification, and participation in one or more Scrum teams. And yet, as a role, the Scrum Master can be much more. They are a success factor, enabler and effective amplifier for agility. The exciting question is therefore how a Scrum Master can achieve visible success for the team, the department, and the entire organisation.

The tasks and responsibilities of the Scrum Master

The tasks of a Scrum Master are clearly defined in the Scrum Guide (2020 version) and have changed only marginally in recent years.

• Facilitation of Scrum events (e.g. Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective).
• Coaching the Product Owner in backlog management and stakeholder interactions.
• Supporting the developers in self-organisation, focus and continuous improvement.
• Removing impediments (if these are beyond the control of the team).
• Working with the organisation to promote agile working practices and remove obstacles in structures or processes.

The role of the Scrum Master is therefore characterised by a wide range of tasks both within and outside the Scrum team.

The responsibilities of the Scrum Master are also clearly described in the Scrum Guide:

• Promote Scrum and ensure that responsibilities and activities are understood and practised.
• As a servant leader, promote collaboration between the Scrum team, Product Owner and organisation.
• Increase the effectiveness of the Scrum team and guide the team towards greater effectiveness.

This clearly shows that increasing effectiveness is clearly the responsibility of the Scrum Master.

Ineffectiveness as a Scrum Master – causes and stumbling blocks

Scrum is deliberately described as a lightweight framework. Without a lot of frills and additional explanations, the Scrum Guide is written in a way that is easy to understand and follow. This makes Scrum easy to teach and, in theory, quick to implement within a team. Nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because of this, the Scrum Master can quickly become ineffective if their usefulness and success are not clearly visible and, above all, comprehensible.

A common reason for the ineffectiveness of Scrum Masters is a misunderstanding of their role. All too often, they are seen as mere event moderators whose main task is to organise appointments, stick colourful Post-its on the wall or adhere to Scrum rules. If the role is interpreted in this way, it inevitably remains superficial and interchangeable.

In addition, the Scrum Master rarely produces immediate ‘hard’ results. Unlike developers or Product Owner, their value contribution cannot be measured in lines of code or features. This quickly leads to the false assumption that the Scrum Master is ‘nice to have’ but actually dispensable.

Typical stumbling blocks that can lead to ineffectiveness:

• Lack of organisational support: If managers do not accept the Scrum Master as a driver of change, their work remains limited to symbolic gestures. Impediments that should actually be resolved at management level remain unresolved because ‘that’s how it’s always been done’.
• Lack of clarity of expectations: Often, neither the team nor the organisation knows what they specifically expect from the Scrum Master. If an increase in effectiveness is not translated into commonly understood goals, the role remains elusive and thus a breeding ground for scepticism.
• Reduction to event moderation: If the Scrum Master is only responsible for ensuring that daily, review or retro functions work as a whole, their scope of action is massively reduced. This creates the impression that the Scrum Master merely plays a moderating role.
• Overloading with unrelated tasks: In many organisations, the Scrum Master becomes a stopgap for everything that no one else wants to do: project management, controlling, reporting or operational activities. This not only takes up his time, but also undermines his credibility when he should actually be driving change and effectiveness.
• Lack of understanding of agility: When stakeholders reduce Scrum to a set of rituals and do not support its actual core – transparency, empiricism, continuous improvement – the Scrum Master is in a permanent defensive role. He then fights more against misunderstandings than he can drive improvements.
• Impatience and expectations of quick results, as well as changes in teams and organisation, take time. If no noticeable successes are visible after two sprints, the value of the role is quickly called into question. The Scrum Master thus finds himself in a permanent mode of justification.

This is how a key function is degraded to a decorative supporting role, visible but ultimately powerless.

Figure: Typical stumbling blocks for Scrum Masters

Increasing team effectiveness

As described above, responsibility for the effectiveness of the Scrum team lies with the Scrum Master. This effectiveness can be promoted and increased in various ways:

In retrospect, for example, the Scrum Master has the opportunity to have his own contribution to team effectiveness evaluated by the Scrum Team and to actively ask for suggestions for improvement. With this feedback, he can develop appropriate tools, feedback loops or training measures. Such internal team reflection could take place every six months, for example, and thus support continuous development.

Metrics can help to make effectiveness visible. Key figures from the toolbox of other agile approaches, such as Kanban, are useful for this purpose. Cycle time, work item age or throughput help to evaluate the ‘flow’ of the team. User feedback can also be included, both quantitatively in the form of satisfaction ratings and qualitatively through feedback in direct exchanges. This makes it possible to see whether training or input from the Scrum Master is making a noticeable contribution to team effectiveness. In addition, technical metrics such as loading times, connectivity or the frequency of error messages can be collected on an ongoing basis to make the impact measurable at the product level.

The Scrum Master’s responsibilities also include promoting agility throughout the entire organisation. They make Scrum understandable and clear, show stakeholders how they can contribute meaningfully, support collaboration between the Scrum Team and users, and explain the process of key events such as the Sprint Review. With a stronger understanding of agile principles and practices, the number of obstacles encountered by the team decreases, further increasing its effectiveness.

Finally, although the Scrum Master’s core function remains the same, this does not mean that their role must remain unchanged. Since the Scrum Guide is deliberately kept lightweight, tasks and responsibilities can be adapted to the specific needs of the team and organisation. For example, the Scrum Master could take responsibility for comprehensive testing, including gathering user feedback, offering training and workshops when onboarding new employees, or keeping track of current developments in the field of AI and making them available to the team in a practical way. This provides easy access to new support options that further enrich agile software development.

Conclusion

In the end, one thing is clear: in Scrum, the Scrum Master is responsible for increasing team effectiveness. However, he can only fulfil this responsibility if the organisation and its members create the framework for this and support his work. It is crucial not to reduce them to the role of a mere moderator. They can only be truly effective if they are seen as an enabler, coach and multiplier for agility – within the team, beyond team boundaries and throughout the entire organisation.

If the Scrum Master is taken seriously in this way, the application of methods will result in genuine effectiveness and added value. If, on the other hand, they are reduced to organising appointments or sticking colourful notes on the wall, Scrum loses its core and degenerates into an empty shell. Long-term success therefore depends not only on the Scrum Master themselves, but essentially on the interaction with an organisation that truly lives and breathes transparency, empirical work and continuous improvement.

Notes:

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Niklas Magerl has published another post on the t2informatik Blog: