Help: a Scrum Master is an impediment

Hi Fremen,

in SCRUM you are a self organizing team, you have a retrospective at the end of every sprints. There you can confront the "bad" SM with the problems. (Well sometimes it won't be enough to solve the problem, then you need to escalate it - but the SCRUM Guide don't suggest it, it's just how real life works.)

Greetings,
Peter

As a self-organizing team at first you guys are responsible for resolving the impediment, if it doesn't work then go to SM. Since he himself is a problem here so as Pete said, you have to escalate it. Scrum talks about the Respect and Courage.

While adopting Scrum, organization's management is making a commitment that they will support the change, will remove the impediments, if required.

As a PO you are accountable for product value. If this is being negatively impacted then you may indeed have a responsibility to escalate the evidence to stakeholders, including management.

Important caveat: the perceived behaviors you have described do not always indicate a "bad" Scrum Master. They may also indicate a Scrum Master who is trying to coach a new team in practices which are unfamiliar to them, and which has set them in opposition. Scrum brings deep and profound change which can be highly disruptive until it becomes normalized. Obviously I don't know how relevant this is to your situation, and to what extent the SM is "the problem". The truth may lie somewhere in between.

If the team believe they could do a better job, then one self-organization technique is to rotate the Scrum Master role every Sprint. Remember that being an SM is not necessarily a full-time job. This would allow experimentation, and for team experience to develop about what works well. Outcomes can be elicited and discussed in each Retrospective.

Hello,
First of all, thanks for all the answers, I have gathered some ideas. I wanted to write a longer message, but I think an example or two of the SM behaviour should be enough.

Today we wasted more than 30 minutes because he got into an argument with the Agile Coach, myself and some of the team. 30 minutes of wasted time ending with no less than 3 coaches slowly losing patience, because arguments bounce off him. I bring this up because everything he says and does is so that nothing has to be done, nothing has to be estimated (he actually struggles to conceal product information - fights actively against transparency, any kind of documentation or knowledge sharing - because this is how it was so far and he does not understand that this must change, he makes a mock of the Daily Scrum - interupts speakers, but is happy to waste hours in pointless, irrelevant meetings - non Scrum Master related, just old meetings he used to go for different products for which he doesnt work any more which in turn results in him clearly faking estimation). Basically he is an agressive "slow changer". He's a know-it-all who becomes aggresive when having to adapt to some basic (common sense) team rules.

Getting back to the argument he had with the Agile Coach, I should add that basically we had more such discussions for extremely rare occuring particularities, where the discussion lasted longer than a year of the actual resolve time of the type of issue in discussion.

I appologise, this saddens me and feels a bit shameful to talk about, but I guess a little more information might make things more clear and help provide a more complete table of options.

Thank you,
F

A good agile coach will be a Scrum Master to the organization. Explain your concerns to the coaches involved and get them to recommend a remedy. It may be that you need to escalate matters yourself, but you should work with them as far as possible.

Remember that if the situation is extreme and the agreed Sprint Goal is unlikely to be met because of the SM's behavior, then as PO you have the authority to cancel the Sprint since the delivery of value has been compromised.

Please make him take the scrum master course again! That will make him understand the scrum values - Commitment to the team and RESPECT to other member's opinions.

I hope I'm wrong, but I'm afraid a course is not enough to trigger a real switch in the mind of someone.

Why is he still on the team?

He doesn't seem to be a Scrum master.

How did he get the job? Who approved him? What was the decision based on?
This would interest me even more than his understanding of Scrum and Agile in general.