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