According to the Scrum Guide, the Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring Scrum is understood and enacted. Scrum Masters do this by ensuring that the Scrum Team adheres to Scrum theory, practices, and rules.
The Scrum Master is a servant‐leader for the Scrum Team. He or she helps those outside the team understand which of their interactions with the team are helpful and which aren’t. The Scrum Master helps everyone change these interactions to maximize the value created by the Scrum Team.
The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand the spirit of Scrum.
The Scrum Master Acts as a...
- Servant Leader whose focus is on the needs of the team members and those they serve (the customer), with the goal of achieving results in line with the organization’s values, principles, and business objectives.
- Facilitator by setting the stage and providing clear boundaries in which the team can collaborate.
- Coach coaching the individual with a focus on mindset and behavior, the team in continuous improvement and the organization in truly collaborating with the Scrum Team.
- Manager responsible for managing impediments, eliminating waste, managing the process, managing the team’s health, managing the boundaries of self‐organization, and managing the culture.
- Mentor that transfers agile knowledge and experience to the team.
- Teacher to ensure Scrum and other relevant methods are understood and enacted.
- Impediment Remover solving blocking issues to the team’s progress, taking into account the self‐organizing capabilities of the Development Team.
- Change Agent to enable a culture in which Scrum Teams can flourish.
The white paper "The 8 Stances of a Scrum Master" contains my personal experiences acting as a Scrum Master. Besides these experiences, I’ve added my most important findings while researching the 8 different stances studying books, articles and videos.
You can download the whitepaper here. I hope you enjoy the result!
Learn More
You can learn more about Agile & Scrum by:
- Attending a Professional Scrum training, powered by Scrum.org. Check this page for my upcoming courses.
- Exploring my Scrum toolkit with lots of articles, books, checklists, presentations, tools and videos I recommend.