Typical Challenges of a Scrum Master

Contribution by Dan Greenberg

Material Taken From…

https://www.knowledgehut.com/blog/agile/5-hurdles-that-scrum-masters-commonly-face

Managing Role Expectations

The Scrum Master role can be confused with a Project Manager but in reality the two are not related at all. A Scrum Master is a facilitator and a servant leader, whose role on the team is to champion continuous improvement and protect the team from distraction so it can focus on the work. A Scrum Master is NOT a reporter of status, a manager, nor a producer of metrics.

Resistance to Change

Many teams develop transformation fatigue. We’ve been working together for 20 years and every few months some new corporate initiative comes down but because nothing ever really changes, it becomes like the boy who cried wolf. Now Agile is the hot new flavor of the month, but I’ve been through dozens of flavors of the month over the years and if you just wait it out, pretty soon it will be gone and a new one will take its place. So why is this any different? It’s best to remember that we can’t fix this problem with a bunch of buzzwordy talk about DevOps, cross-functional teams, and faster deployment. The likely case is that no one has ever listened to the team and worked with them rather than at them. So let them know that you have no skin in the game, no side agenda that you are pushing. You only exist to find out what the team’s biggest problem is at any given time and to be a part of helping solve it to the biggest extent possible given your role. Remember that you are on the team, not someone trying to get the team to do something.

Keeping Everything TimeBoxed

Have you heard of the fishbowl theory of meetings? A goldfish will grow to the size of the bowl that it lives in; in the same way, meetings will always take the amount of time that you schedule for them. This, however, does not have to be the case. A powerful tool is the concept of lean meetings. There are many theories around lean meetings but a great three-rule framework is:

·      Every meeting has a goal, made clear IN THE MEETING INVITE.

·      When the goal is reached, the meeting ends, no matter how little time has elapsed. If we reach the goal in 2 minutes, but the room was scheduled for an hour, congratulations – you just got your 58 minutes back.

·      Any conversation that does not directly pertain to our meeting’s goal is parking-lot-ted for future discussion.

Handling Urgent Requests

“I know you all are in the middle of a sprint, but can you stop everything and work on this all-of-a-sudden top priority?” Part of protecting the team means coaching managers and other stakeholders about when something is or is not urgent enough to disrupt the team. One of the points of a 2-week (or however long) sprint is that it gives the team 2 weeks of quiet heads down time. The Scrum Master needs to keep that sacred.

Distributed Teams

Whether in different time zones or just different quadrants of the building, teams that don’t sit together will always present a challenge. Phone calls and emails cause information to be lost that otherwise would have useful, such as tone, facial expressions, and back-and-forth banter. (Laughter too – though emojis are good J)