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