Enhance your Journey as a Scrum Master
Embarking on a journey as a Scrum Master is a challenging and rewarding endeavor. As you step into this accountability, you'll find yourself at the crossroads of collaboration, leadership, and continuous improvement - a position that is critical to deliver value effectively.
These core tenets of the Scrum Master Accountability are addressed in the following collection of articles and videos that contain practical ideas, tips, and activities with step-by-step guidelines that you can try immediately.
Bookmark or save and return to those resources often; you can find your saved resources in your Scrum.org profile under Saved Content.
The Scrum Master's Accountabilities
Learn more about the Scrum Master's accountabilities, what it takes to be a Professional Scrum Master and some common myths about Scrum Masters.
The Scrum Master is accountable for the Scrum Team’s effectiveness and for establishing Scrum as it is defined in the Scrum Guide. Excellent Scrum Masters help their teams deliver value. They can help transform a team that struggles, into a team that delivers value every Sprint.
Understanding and Applying the Scrum Framework
Familiarity with the Scrum framework is the first step to using Scrum. Using Scrum to its best advantage requires a deeper understanding of Scrum theory and practice. Explore the following resources to take a deeper dive into some practical aspects of the framework.
In Scrum, empiricism refers to the idea that solving complex problems, or doing complex work, can only be done using an exploratory process rather than relying on predetermined plans. Learn about empiricism and complex work. Explore why trust is important for empiricism to thrive.
For agility to thrive, the culture of the organization must support the fundamental concepts of agility. The Scrum Values - Focus, Respect, Openness, Commitment, and Courage - create an environment where empiricism, self-management and continual improvement are more successful.
The Scrum Team is a small unit of professionals focused on attaining the Product Goal. Scrum Teams consist of a Product Owner, Scrum Master and Developers. Each has a clear set of accountabilities. Learn more about the Scrum Team, accountabilities, responsibilities and why these aren’t called “roles.”
The five Scrum Events provide regular opportunities for enacting the Scrum pillars of Inspection, Adaptation and Transparency. In addition, they help teams keep aligned with the Sprint and Product Goals, improve Developer productivity, remove impediments and reduce the need to schedule too many additional meetings.
In archeology, an artifact is an object of cultural significance. In medicine, artifacts are something not normally present, or unexpected. In Scrum, our use of the word “artifact” is closer to the way software developers use it: important information needed during the development of a product.
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The best way to support a team working on complex problems is to give them the space to determine how to do their work, rather than directing them. Learn about self-managing teams and their characteristics. Explore some myths and misunderstandings about self-management.
How to be more effective as a Scrum Master
As a Scrum Master, you are accountable for the Scrum Team’s effectiveness. But what does that mean and how might you do it?
The following resources are a great first step in exploring what team effectiveness is and dives into some key Scrum Master techniques like how to enable Scrum and its purpose and how to encourage a continuous improvement mindset.
There is no one direct path to become a great Scrum Master. However, we've assembled a few insights and ideas on topics such as driving toward goals, living the Scrum Values, enabling collaboration, removing obstacles, instilling self-management, promoting psychological safety, and encouraging a continuous improvement mindset.
Joining a Scrum Team
As a Scrum Master joining a Scrum Team, you’ll want to get to know the team, understand their needs, challenges, goals, the organizational environment in which they work and who the stakeholders are.
The following resources offer tools to help a new Scrum Master assimilate into the team and get familiar with their new environment.
As a new Scrum Master you’ll want to get to know your team, the people outside of your team that you’ll work with, including stakeholders to help the team improve at delivering value. To help you get started, here are some questions and tips to consider when you join a new team as a Scrum Master and suggestions on building collaborative relationships.
Encouraging collaboration on the Scrum Team
Working together on shared goals is a key aspect of a Scrum Team’s success. The following resources provide several techniques to help a Scrum Master promote a collaborative environment including steps on how to create a team working agreement as well as a video on how to create a team’s first Definition of Done.
To help ensure that the work the Scrum Team delivers is valuable, they need to work together, share ideas and responsibilities and have team ownership while also working closely with their stakeholders, including customers and end users.
Enabling effective Scrum Events
Often, Scrum events don’t go as planned. Good, lightweight facilitation can help the Scrum Teams get back on track. The following resources provide techniques for facilitating the Scrum Events as well as offering tips for Product Backlog refinement.
Scrum events create regularity and transparency and minimize the need for meetings not defined in Scrum. The events are the Daily Scrum, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective, and the Sprint. Often, Scrum events don’t go as planned. Good, lightweight facilitation can help the Scrum Te...
Product Backlog items (PBI) evolve over time. They start as vague ideas and are improved as more information is uncovered. Eventually they are well enough defined that they can be brought onto a Sprint Backlog.
The activity of continually improving PBIs until they are ready to be worked on is cal...
Dealing with Impediments
Scrum Masters should help the team learn how to address and resolve impediments. These resources offer advice on learning how to identify, create transparency around and resolve impediments.
Scrum Master job descriptions typically include the following: “Help remove impediments for the team” or “Accountable for removing impediments”. Organizations clearly find impediment removal to be an important aspect of the role. But what is meant by impediments? Should a Scrum Master remove all the...
Developing People and Teams
As Scrum Masters increasingly support Scrum Team members, as well as other members of the organization.
The ways that leaders present themselves and interact with their colleagues can either support agility, or defeat it. Learn the difference between leaders and managers and the traits of an agile leadership style. Explore why we speak more about agile leadership and not servant leadership.
Guiding colleagues toward continuous self and team improvement requires a Scrum Master to have skills in facilitation, coaching, mentoring and teaching, as well as the understanding of when to use each.
Facilitation can be used to lead people toward agreed-upon objectives in a manner that encourages participation, ownership and creativity by all involved. Learn about the principles of facilitation, skills and traits of a facilitator, how to facilitate diverse perspectives and explore some facilitation techniques for the Scrum Events.
The coach’s job is to be a process expert, enabling those they are coaching to achieve their goals using skills such as developmental conversations, active listening and asking thought-provoking questions. Learn a few of the coaching principles, traits and skills of a coach, and why coaching is beneficial for Scrum Teams.
Mentoring is a mutually beneficial relationship in which a mentor provides guidance to a mentee to help the mentee reach their goals. It’s often confused with coaching. Learn why mentoring is beneficial for Scrum Team, mentoring principles, skills and traits of a mentor as well as the traits of a mentee.
Anyone can act as a teacher, helping your colleagues obtain new knowledge or learn new skills. However, if you want to become a very effective teacher, it’s best if you learn a few of the principles of the teaching profession, the skills and traits of a teacher and when teaching can be helpful for a Scrum Team.
When to use Facilitation, Coaching, Mentoring or Teaching
We often use the words “coaching,” “mentoring,” “teaching,” and “facilitating” informally. We may say that we're being coached on how to become a better golfer, or that the person managing the agenda in a meeting is the meeting's facilitat...
Assess Your Capabilities as a Scrum Master
The Scrum Master Improvement self-assessment will guide you through a series of questions and based on your answers you will receive recommendations for a variety of curated learning resources to help you grow to better support your teams.
Together with Comparative Agility, Scrum.org offers a self-assessment to help you grow as a Scrum Master. This tool helps you evaluate your Scrum Master skills and assess areas for improvement based on the Professional Scrum Competencies by Scrum.org.
