What does a Scrum Master do during the Sprint?
After the Sprint Planning meeting an ideal development team will leverage self-organization and self-management to deliver the sprint backlog. If the team is highly motivated and understands scrum well, then what does the scrum master during the sprint?
I have broken it down to three sections for a ScrumMaster-Core responsibilities, Role with efficient and mature teams and their role with new teams.
Core responsibilities of a ScrumMaster include the following
Teach Scrum to the Development Team, Product Owner and the rest of the organization.
Experiment with new ideas to help the team become self-organization and self-managing
Help/assist in taking care of any impediments for the team
Ensure the Team/organization is following Scrum and getting more effecient in delivering with Scrum
ScrumMASTER ROLE WITH MATURE Scrum TEAMS
Getting a team to be mature in Scrum may be the first commendable victory for the ScrumMaster. However, the team does not work in isolation it is supported by the organization. So, the responsibility of a ScrumMaster in this scenario may be
Align the rest of the organization with the Scrum principles and core values.
Assisting the team by following up on any impediments for the team
Working with the Product Owner to ensure the product backlog is refined for the Product Backlog Refinement Meetings and the planning meetings.
Pro-actively take care of any conflict personality disagreements between the team members
Collecting feedback for the Retrospective Meeting and looking for ways to improve team dynamics and efficiency of the team
ScrumMASTER ROLE WITH NEW TEAMS
A typical day for a ScrumMaster may look like this
| 8 AM | Review the Agile Management Tool to see ensure everyone in the team has updated the tool to be ready for the Daily Scrum |
| 9 AM | Daily Scrum -Review any of the impediments that came up during the daily Scrum and make sure that the individuals in the team have taken responsibility for closing/chasing the Impediments If you are an SM for multiple teams then you can have back to back daily scrums |
| 10 AM | Follow up on any of the impediments that the SM is chasing down for the team |
| 11 AM | Work with Stakeholders and other Organizational leaders on making the Organization better align with Scrum |
| Noon | |
| 1 PM | Assist in P.O with any dependency management and refine the Product Backlog for upcoming Sprints |
| 2 PM | Coach/Teach/Facilitate Scrum elements for better organization of the Development Team and the organization. |
| 3 PM | Work with the Senior Management on how to make Scrum adoption better and faster in the organization |
| 4 PM | Facilitate the Product backlog Refinement with the Scrum team or Work on the upcoming Retrospective and look ar action items that came up in the previous Sprint retrospective |
| 5 PM | Send reminder to the team to update their tool for the Daily Scrum |