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A daily effort would include coaching, mentoring, collaborating, maximising the team's potential and continuous improvement, helping the team mature, and facilitating the removal of impediments.
The presence of a Scrum Master goes beyond facilitating Scrum Events and meetings and resolving impediments. It fundamentally transforms the team's approach to work and problem-solving.
The Scrum Master encourages the team to embrace change, not as a challenge but as an opportunity for growth and innovation. This mindset shift leads to more dynamic, responsive, and proactive team behaviour, greatly enhancing the team's ability to deliver value and overall effectiveness.
1. Team Coach and Mentor:
The Scrum Master nurtures team dynamics and helps resolve interpersonal issues. It involves coaching team members in self-management and fostering cross-functionality, encouraging an atmosphere where every member feels empowered to contribute their best work. They also teach and mentor the team in Scrum and other agile practices, ensuring everyone understands why agility is needed in product development and effectively adapting agile ways of working to their context.
2. Promoting Great Facilitation:
Whether it's Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Review, or Retrospective events, the Scrum Master ensures these are productive and kept within time constraints. They guide the team to focus on the current objectives and encourage participation from all members, ensuring everyone's voice is heard and valued. While the Scrum Master is accountable for good facilitation being practised at the team level, the team should also improve and practice their facilitation skills on a daily basis. This is a sign of team maturity.
3. Facilitating Impediment Removal:
A significant part of their day is identifying and facilitating the removal of obstacles that impede the team's progress. Whether they are technical roadblocks, team conflicts, or external dependencies, the Scrum Master works tirelessly to address these issues promptly and efficiently. This includes involving the team, teaching and mentoring them in practices that can prevent future similar problems from reoccurring, and spending time outside the team working on product or organisational-wide challenges.
4. Transparency and Trust:
The Scrum Master helps the team focus on their work. They do this by promoting the importance of product vision and goals and encouraging the right level of transparency at the product backlog level.
In order to do this, they help the Product Owner understand what the team needs to be effective and focus on what’s most important. They also interact with stakeholders and company leadership and help communicate the team's progress and needs. This helps foster transparency and trust.
5. Continuous Improvement Advocate:
They drive the team towards continuous improvement, encouraging reflection and adaptation. By promoting a culture of feedback and learning, the Scrum Master helps the team enhance their processes, tools, and relationships, aiming for increased efficiency and effectiveness in their work.
The Scrum Master focuses on team dynamics where creative risk-taking is encouraged, and failure, although not wished for, is viewed as a learning opportunity, not a setback. They are accountable for promoting business agility and Scrum values within the team and the broader organisation.
Nurturing a positive and supportive team and organisational culture not only helps with commercial success by achieving goals and building long-standing products but also boosts morale and helps retain top talents.
This article was first published in the AskScrum.com newsletter.
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