Last week, I had identified some of the challenges in the Agile space that has made some organizations question the value of the Scrum Master – a critical role, so as a follow up that post, please find a few ways a Scrum Master could provide tangible value to their enterprise.
What: One-on-One Meetings; this is a very crucial opportunity to understand your team member, address identified areas of improvement and have them discuss with you in private. Unlike the case in Traditional Project Management, in Agile, one-on-ones are not only for people managers, it is also a responsibility of the Scrum Master. That being said, team members do indeed have dotted line reporting into the Scrum Master because you are responsible for their performance.
How: Schedule a 30-minute timebox with each team member every week. You should have an agenda, while coaching agendas are typically set by the coachee, in this instance, it is recommended that you both contribute to the agenda because this is your one opportunity to have discussions tailored to the specific team member’s performance. Always end the meeting with action items and ensure that they are held accountable by providing you with timelines and updates by your next meeting.
Why: One-on-ones provide a dedicated and focused platform for communication and provide values such as: individualized attention, private feedback and performance reviews, clarifies expectations, personal goal setting and alignment, personalized training opportunity, opportunity for private conflict resolution, personalized career development discussions, amongst others.
What: Employee Skill Management; since you are responsible for the performance of the team, collectively and individually, you have to pay attention to their skillset.
How: With an ever-evolving technological landscape, often you would find that there are new skills the team needs to learn, or there is a need to pivot on an existing skill. One advice I usually give to Scrum Masters is to create a skills matrix if they don’t already have one. This matrix should have a column for different skills required by the team or the enterprise and the team members should rate themselves on a scale of 1-5 for each skill. There should also be an additional column with skills they wish to learn and once you have this information, you can use it in preparation for your one-on-one meetings and to facilitate the process of getting them whatever training they might require. You should partner with whoever can make this decision in your enterprise to get an internal or external trainer. For Scrum related trainings, you should do this yourself.
Why: Skill development is crucial for the professional development of your team members; it leads to an increase in productivity, improves the chances for their career advancement, improves their job satisfaction, increases their confidence and personal fulfillment, in addition to these, any employee would appreciate an organization that invests in them, just as they invest in the organization.
What: Coaching; a Coach doesn’t provide the answer, rather, they guide the Coachee to the solution.
How: Using powerful questions. Powerful questions are thought provoking, generate curiosity, channel focus, stimulate reflective conversation amongst others. Example of a powerful question: What hasn’t been said that would help us reach a deeper level of understanding and clarity?
Why: This is because powerful questions have a ton of benefits such as: encouraging ownership, inspiring creativity, clarifying goals amongst others. Ultimately, you want the team member to arrive at the solution themselves, this supports the concept of autonomy.
What: Facilitation; this involves guiding and supporting the Scrum team and other stakeholders in the effective use of Scrum practices.
How: Preparing for Scrum events, setting the agenda, encouraging expected behaviour, timekeeping, ensuring collaboration, creating a safe environment, coordination, issue resolution, conflict resolution amongst others.
Why: It ensures that Scrum events are successful, promotes effective communication, promotes collaboration, manages conflict, removes impediments, ensures time management is effective amongst others.
What: Act as a Servant Leader; As a servant leader, you adopt a leadership style that prioritizes serving and supporting others, rather than asserting authority and control.
How: You put others first, demonstrate empathy, empower others, lead by example, see yourself as a steward of the team; you consciously guide and develop the team for the greater good of the organization.
Why: It contributes to a positive organizational culture, employee engagement, and overall success of the team and the enterprise by improving employee well-being, increasing employee engagement, enhancing collaboration, improving morale, increasing employee retention amongst others.
What: Remove Impediments; Despite our best efforts, every initiative will likely encounter some impediments at some point, and this has to be removed to engender Flow (delivery of value without impediments/delays).
How: Identify impediments by monitoring the team’s progress, open communication; ensuring there is psychological safety so the team can feel comfortable reporting impediments without fear of blame, by working with the team to prioritize impediments based on their impact on the ability to deliver value, by escalating impediments as needed, amongst others.
Why: This is because everything moves fast in today’s world; customer desires, business expectations, revenue opportunities, competitive threats, etc., so any delays or blockers are a serious threat to Business Agility. Ultimately, by removing impediments, the Scrum Master ensures that the team can overcome obstacles that might otherwise delay the delivery of valuable features or improvements.
What: Determine Capacity: As a Scrum Master, it is your responsibility to understand the capacity of your team each Iteration (Sprint) so that you pull a reasonable amount of work into the Iteration.
How: Your Capacity over time helps you to understand your Velocity. SAFe has a very effective way of doing this and you can find this below:
1. For every team member contributing to Solution development, give the team 8 points.
2. Subtract 1 point for every team member’s vacation day and holiday.
3. Find a small Story that would take about a half-day to develop and a half-day to test and validate. Call it a 1-point Story.
4. Estimate every other Story relative to that 1.
As stated above, in SAFe, one day of development and testing (complete work for a Story) is assigned 1 Story Point. SAFe uses 2-week Iterations and each team member is assigned 8 Story Points (2-week Iterations have 10 business days but remember that day 1 of the Iteration and day 10 of the Iteration are for Iteration Planning and Iteration Demos respectively, so there’s not much deliverable expected, in addition to the fact that we mustn’t Load to Capacity. So each team member gets 8 Story Points minus their time away (you have to always ask each team member during the Iteration Planning meeting what their availability will be.) You subtract a Story Point for each day a team member will be away, and then add the remaining Story Points to arrive at your Capacity. For example, if you have a team of 5, excluding the Scrum Master and the Product Owner, you would ask everyone if they have time off and if Mr. A has 2 days off (6 points left for him), Miss B. has 1 day off, (7 points left for her) and Mr. C has 1 day off (7 points left for him), and if everyone else is fully available, you would use this calculation: 40 Story Points – 4 days away (4 Story Points), to arrive at 36 Story Points. You then load your Iteration with a maximum of approximately 32 Points (never match your Capacity with your Load, always leave a buffer).
Why: It allows teams to understand their work capacity. It ensures that work is distributed evenly, preventing overloading of resources, and it promotes a more sustainable pace of work. In addition to this, it allows for more accurate predictions of delivery timelines. Knowing your capacity enables teams to commit to a realistic amount of work for a given Iteration, enhancing predictability in the delivery of features and increments, amongst other benefits.
What: Capacity Allocation; This is where you allocate time to different work types to ensure there is balance and efficiency. Your team should avoid focusing so much on new feature development that they ignore maintenance and cleanups to avoid future problems like technical debt. There should be a percentage allocated to: Stories, refactoring, maintenance etc. I often see Product Owners pushing for their business Stories to be completed leaving the team with no time to maintain the current system, effective Capacity Allocation helps eliminate this problem.
How: Based on your environment, which you as a Scrum Master should understand (otherwise I encourage you to check with the team), you should coach/teach/mentor the team and Product Owner to assign percentages to the time they will be spending on different work types each Iteration. If for instance, you have noticed an increase in issues with the existing system, that might indicate that not enough maintenance is being done and you might decide that for this Iteration, we are doing: User Stories: 60%, Maintenance: 30%, Refactoring: 10% etc.
Why: This is important because it takes away the need to compare different work types and arbitrarily prioritize. By evaluating your system and environment, it becomes obvious what amount of effort is required for each work type to maintain efficiency.
What: Enforcing DoD; The Definition of Done is a concept (checklist) that represents the set of criteria or conditions that must be met for a Product Backlog Item or User Story to be considered complete and potentially shippable. It serves as a shared understanding among the members of the development team, Product Owner, and other stakeholders regarding the expectations for a finished and deliverable increment of work. It is your responsibility as Scrum Master to ensure that teams work with this. I have seen teams try to push this off as unnecessary but that is not correct. In collaborative work, the value of a common understanding can never be overestimated.
How: Very simply, do a workshop for the team that demonstrates the value of having a DoD (common understanding) and then let them determine the particular criteria that would determine that their product is done. It is different for each product/team. Along with your team, you should revisit and update your DoD regularly to adapt to changing product requirements or team dynamics.
Why: The Definition of Done is crucial for maintaining transparency, quality, and consistency in product development. It helps prevent misunderstandings about what it means for work to be considered complete and ensures that the team delivers increments that meet the required standards.
What: Jira Management; You would be surprised to know some of the things I have seen in Jira. Stories not being in the right status or column, bad workflows, badly written User Stories, no Acceptance Criteria, not using the right metrics, the list is endless. While your organization might have a Jira Admin, while the Product Owner is responsible for the business side of the Backlog, it is your responsibility as a Scrum Master to ensure that your Jira tool is clean and efficient.
How: You should do daily walk-throughs in Jira to do cleanups, edits and to identify areas of improvement that could lead to workshops for the team to improve, or to identify areas of improvement to be discussed with team members during your one-on-ones. As a Scrum Master, it is your responsibility to keep Jira clean and efficient. Take a course on Jira Administration, there are many free courses on YouTube and cheap, very comprehensive courses on Udemy.
Why: This is important because if Jira is populated with redundant Stories, Stories with the wrong status, poorly written Stories, delivery performance not being measured, bad workflows etc., it makes the tool less efficient and effective and the value of Jira to Agile product development cannot be overestimated.
What: Performance Measurements; It is very important to know how a team is performing to know if and what needs to be improved; Agile is all about continuous improvement after all.
How: SAFe uses its Measure and Grow tools and guidance to determine your progress towards Business Agility. Some of the tools I would recommend you use to measure your team and enterprise’s performance are: SAFe’s Team and Technical Agility, Agile Product Delivery and Organizational Agility Assessments. When it comes to metrics, the first and most important thing is understanding what to measure. The goal of Business Agility is clear: quickly respond to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative, digitally-enabled business solutions. The insights provided by these tools support better decision-making and help to identify opportunities for improvement.
Why: Measuring your performance provides a lot of benefits including: evaluation of progress, identification of issues and risks, resource allocation and optimization, decision making, continuous improvement, prioritization, amongst others.
The above are a just a few of the responsibilities of a Scrum Master but I will stop here in a bid to keep the article brief. It is easy to see that if a Scrum Master were to be busy fulfilling all these and more responsibilities, their value would never be called into question as the results would speak for themselves.
I will be addressing the responsibilities of the Agile Coach in my next article.
Questions and comments are welcome.