THE SCRUM MASTER - IS THERE A SKILLS GAP?
The Role of the Scrum Master
We’ve come across a lot of scrum masters on our courses and we’ve discovered the challenges they face are noticeably common. On those grounds we decided it worth highlighting those challenges on a page focussed on the Scrum Master’s role.
Here goes!
The Scrum Master has a crucial role to play in enabling teams to deliver valuable products and services. Particularly in the defence sector where collaboration and innovation is key across departments and the wider supply chain.
As the team is self organising, the scrum master is there to create an environment of teamwork and collaboration. The aim is to focus the team ensuring it achieves against goals and delivers results at the end of each sprint.
The scrum master role is not as a manager or commander of the team; the primary responsibility is to be a servant-leader whose focus is on the needs of the team members and those they serve (the customer, the project manager, the stakeholders). But secondly, the scrum master role is multi-faceted: facilitator, coach, mentor (and 8 more we have identified), which means they need an assortment of skills, experience and practice to excel is making the team they serve successful.
Hard and soft skills
Using both hard and soft skills the scrum master enables, encourages and energises the team to develop and perform at their full potential.
So in what ways does the scrum master serve the team? We go through this bit next.
What makes a great Scrum Master?
Let’s look a bit closer at what the scrum master typical needs to do in their role and how doing it well makes them successful:
Facilitates meetings: daily stand up meeting (DSUM), sprint planning, sprint demo and retrospective.
A Teacher: identifies the need for training and ensuring training is given where it’s needed.
A Coach: has the soft skills to help people to come up with their own solutions (fits with the ethos of the scrum).
A Mentor: uses experience, knowledge, social capital and psychological support to help individuals become self-sufficient in their roles and ultimately better contributors; also helps the team to become self-organising.
Servant leader: focuses on serving the team in a selfless manner, prioritising the needs of individuals to ensure their success within their roles and within the team.
Resolves conflicts: having courageous conversations and focusing on the scrum values of openness, respect and honesty.
Establishes communication channel: where the focus is on the communication recipient. Promotes a means for successful communication whereby the communicator considers the timing, the method and the message so that the receiver is able to fully understand and benefit from the communication.
Provides forecasting and planning: forecasting the number of deliverables possible in an iteration, based on reliable estimations whilst creating agile, practical, useful and reliable plans for making those estimates a reality.
Shields the team: from outside distractions and interferences coming from ‘trespassers’, ‘uninvited guests’ and ‘requestors’.
Enforces scrum rules: ensures the scrum processes and practices are agreed at the start and followed up by the team.
Removes impediments: removes barriers, identifies, tracks and eliminates wasteful activities.
That’s a lot of responsibility on one set of shoulders requiring an assortment of technical, process, management and people skills. On top of which it’s clear that experience and practice have massive role to play in the making the scrum master successful. How do you inject experience and practice into a scrum master when they a new or relatively new to the role?
Is there a training Gap?
Scrum is about people working together in unison for a common goal, it is all about soft skills.
Whilst there is a wide range of excellent technical training available in certified Scrum Master courses across the UK, we have identified there is a fundamental lack in the provision of people skills and practice in the application of those skills. People recognise they need to be a facilitator, a servant leader but don’t know how.
In our most recent Scrum Master training course, only one of the delegates had received any kind of soft skills training previously.
(March 2020)
What does this mean and how does this impact the scrum master’s ability to do their job?
1. Leadership
A common misconception is that the Scrum Master is the boss. This isn’t the case at all. The Scrum Master typically doesn’t have any authority over the group.
So, without authority how does the scrum master help the team achieve the desired results?
2. Facilitating
A Scrum Master’s role goes beyond the facilitation of scrum events (another common misunderstanding). It is to facilitate relationships, collaboration and communication within and across the team environment. However, too often a Scrum Master lacks the softer skills required to facilitate.
Without these ‘softer’ skills how does the Scrum Master facilitate collaboration and create a hub for ideas and innovations?
3. Coaching
Talk less, listen more. A coach’s greatest asset is their ability to listen rather than promote their own ideas, advice and views upon others.
Do modern Scrum Master training methods provision for active listening? (making connections, providing feed-back, summarising, listening empathetically, picking up signs, drawing knowledge learned into asking powerful questions.)
4. Difficult conversations
In serving the team, a Scrum Master is often faced with challenges both within and external to the team. Managing expectations, dealing with change resistance, plus attending to urgent change requests and alterations to the current sprint are some of the common issues faced.
In these challenging situations, is the Scrum Master equipped to have courageous conversations?
5. Removing impediments
Removing obstacles is a function of the Scrum Master’s role however, firstly it is vital to understand if a real problem actually exists. The Scrum Master needs to be able to identify if there is an obstruction and the timing of when and how it should be removed.
What tactics should a Scrum Master consider when facing a potential blockage?
6. Pulling it all together
The role of Scrum Master is incredibly valuable when performed well; it is critical to the success of the team. The position is diverse and performs many functions within the team.
A good Scrum Master is aware of all the roles they play, but do they know when and how to apply them?
What we think
Does any of this sound familiar? It’s clear that the scrum masters we’ve met (and we’ve met many) are experts in the rules, techniques and methods of scrum but not so much in the art of impacting behaviour within and beyond the team. Facilitating, coaching, leading without authority and knowing how to have those courageous conversations are some of the things that are impossible to pick up without experience and practice. And so that is precisely what we offer.
Take a look our dedicated scrum master training offering below and see if it fills the gap for you.
Treehouse training for Scrum masters
Where focused people and facilitation training can fill the Scrum Master skills gap
We offer a 2 day scrum masters skills & confidence course which consists of:
Day 1
AM: Facilitation Skills
PM: Coaching Skills
Day 2
AM: Managing Difficult People & Situations
PM: Influencing without Authority
PM: Overcoming Impediments
Tell, Show, Do
To ensure our delegates get the most from our training we operate under the Tell > Show > Do training methodology:
TELL the theory or concept (uses 10% of time)
SHOW a case study or worked example (uses 15% of time)
DO some practice (75% of time)