Introduced back in 1993 by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, Scrum is a framework that has seen considerable growth in the last few years. Scrum has now become commonplace in just about every organization in the world. And to make sure an organization incorporates and maximizes the value they can obtain from the scrum, scrum masters are employed.
And before you get started on how to become a scrum master, here’s a background of what exactly scrum is.
What is Scrum?
Scrum is a popular framework that aims to enable teams to work together. With the help of scrum, teams can:
- Learn from experiences
- Self-organize working on problems
- Reflect on their victories and losses
- Provide deliverables efficiently
- Use time and money effectively
- Divide projects into timeboxed iterations called sprints
- Provide better visibility to all team members
- Incorporate feedback from clients and customers regularly and
- Focus on the efforts of individual team members
Next up – all you need to know about the role of a certified scrum master.
Who is a Scrum Master?
A scrum master is the scrum team leader and takes charge of handling the project, guiding the team as well as the product owner, and ensuring that team members follow agile values and practices. A scrum master enables communication and collaboration between the business, the product owner, the team, and other individuals involved, and works behind the scenes and is not included in product ideation or strategy.
So now, let’s find out what the responsibilities of a scrum master are. He/ she has a high-level view, enabling them to help the team understand technical and organizational dependencies while handling chokepoints.
Responsibilities of a Scrum Master
- Ensuring that the team incorporates agile practices into their work
- Performing daily scrum meetings to help the team reach an understanding of What work they did yesterday, what they plan to do on that day, and the obstacles they faced
- Ensuring there’s a pleasant relationship between the product owner and the team, as well as with other components outside the team
- A scrum master also ensures that the team is making progress, making sure they are working on the right tasks, removing any obstacles they might be facing, and protecting them from distractions
Are you wondering how a scrum master helps the other essential components of a scrum framework? Here the answer:
1. The Product Owner
- The scrum master helps ensure that the team has a strong understanding of the project’s scope and goals.
- Assists and maintains the product backlog along with the product owner
- Sets up events like daily standups (scrum events) as and when required
2. The Development Team
- Scrum Master coaches the development team to be self-organized
- Helps in removing obstacles faced by the devs
- Sets up scrum events like daily standups (per the requirement)
3. The Entire Organization
- The scrum master helps the organization incorporate the scrum methodology into their workflow
- Coaches the organization to transition into a working scrum framework
- Keeps the organization and the project’s stakeholders informed about the scrum team’s progress on their projects
How to Become a Scrum Master?
1. Scrum and Agile Training
When it comes to scrum master training, you must have a clear understanding of the terms, phrases, systems, and terminologies that need to be understood to safely incorporate the methodologies. A certified scrum master certification would also help provide an understanding of the different scrum practices that need to be followed. This will also have a significant impact on the success of the team and the project by extension.
2. Technical Familiarity
A scrum master would usually have to help software development teams to build programs that keep roadblocks at a minimum and needs to understand the technical terms and processes involved in the process—an understanding of tools like Jira and Asana that would be hugely beneficial to the scrum master.
3. Coaching Abilities
Strong teaching skills can help a scrum master teach teams that are inexperienced with how Scrum works. A scrum master must know what to do and explain to everyone how’s and why’s, and also plays the role of a coach to encourage the members to improve their strengths and weaknesses. They work with each member to enhance the potential of the team.
4. Handling Conflicts
If the team’s conflict cannot be handled among themselves, a scrum master resolves them to ensure they don’t hamper the team’s progress. A scrum master is supposed to be an experienced negotiator and facilitator to help. They must have the appropriate interpersonal skills to handle these disagreements and find a satisfactory solution to everyone involved.
5. Leadership
A scrum master must be able to act as part of the team and be able to keep the team’s needs before that of the individual. They need to be part of the team, as well as part of the team.
