What Are the Responsibilities of a Scrum Master?

The main responsibilities of a Scrum Master are:

• Process improvements
  • Ensures that the Team is fully functional and productive
  • Improve the lives of the Team by facilitating creativity and empowerment
  • Improve the productivity of the Team in any way possible
  • Improve the engineering practices and tools so that each increment of functionality is potentially shippable
• Diplomacy
  • Enables close cooperation across all roles and functions and removes barriers
  • Remove the barriers between the Team and the Product Owner, so the Product Owner directly drives value production.
• Coaching
  • Comprehensively understands the broader Lean-Agile frameworks
  • Continuously learning new tools and techniques aimed at helping the Team excel
• Managing change
  • Control changes as they come in and guide various parties in working the change through the system to best effect
  • Shields the team from external interferences
• Manages impediments and obstacles
• Maintains working agreements such as
  • Definition of Done
  • Definition of Ready
  • Team Working Agreements
• Encourage effective communication
  • Conflict facilitation
  • Teaching others to be more effective at communication
  • Ensures that part-time team members are kept informed
  • Facilitating Iteration activities
• Ensures that the process is followed
  • Logistics and facilitation associated with Daily Stand-up, Iteration Review, Iteration Planning, Backlog Refinement, and Iteration Retrospective as well as other meetings and events
• Updating artifacts
  • Ensures information about the Team’s progress up-to-date and visible to all parties
• Change agent for the organization
  • Helps the organization move to the new way of thinking and operating

While all the above provides details on the role of the Scrum Master, perhaps the best way to think about the role is in terms of the business problem the role is expected to address - focus on improving how we get value delivered better, faster and cheaper. The key change that the Scrum Masters needs to embrace in their new role is to step back from the individuals and the steps required to deliver value, and understand the systematic perspective of how value is delivered through the people, through the steps, and work to improve that system.