What makes the difference between a GOOD Scrum Master and a GREAT Scrum Master?

What makes the difference between a GOOD Scrum Master and a GREAT Scrum Master?

What makes the difference between a GOOD Scrum Master and a GREAT Scrum Master?
via Scrum.org Blog by roland flemm

Even though the global Scrum adoption is now at 75% (source: 14th State of Agile report 2020), the Scrum Master profession is still difficult to grasp for many.

I have encountered and still encounter many organizations struggling with understanding the role of the Scrum Master. These misunderstandings result in sub-optimal mixed roles (developer/scrum master, tester/scrum master, a product owner/scrum master, project manager/scrum master) or the complete omission of the role (the team will pick up the Scrum Master tasks).

The Scrum guide definition

“The Scrum Master is a servant-leader for the Scrum Team. The Scrum Master helps those outside the Scrum Team understand which of their interactions with the Scrum Team are helpful and which aren’t. The Scrum Master helps everyone change these interactions to maximize the value created by the Scrum Team.”

Scrum Guide

Understanding the role became a little bit easier after the 2017 update of the Scrum Guide, when the Scrum Master’s services to the Product Owner, the Development Team, and the whole organization were described more explicitly.

Although pretty elaborate, the Scrum Guide is hardly sufficient in describing the complex reality of this role. That is because the Scrum guide tends to be a little prescriptive as possible. This allows organizations to add practices to the framework so that Scrum can be applied in many different contexts. The downside of this approach is that we need to “fill in the blanks” ourselves, leading to inevitable misinterpretations and faulty implementations of Scrum. Unfortunately, this also applies to the role of the Scrum Master.

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