When I reflect on my experiences as a Scrum Master, one thing becomes abundantly clear: the effectiveness of a Scrum Master hinges on their understanding of the philosophies, theories, and practices relevant to the team they support. Without this foundational knowledge, the impact on both the team and the organisation can be profound.
Imagine a soccer team being coached by someone who has never played the game. How effective would that coach be? The answer is simple: not very. Yet, I often hear the argument, “But Ted Lasso did it!” Let’s be real—Ted Lasso is a fictional character, and his success is scripted. In the real world, successful coaches possess a deep understanding of their sport, including training techniques and the physical demands placed on their players.
The Importance of Competence in Scrum Masters
This principle applies equally to Scrum Masters. If a Scrum Master is working with an engineering team, they must grasp the intricacies of engineering practices. Without this knowledge, meaningful change is unlikely to occur. A Scrum Master who has merely completed a two-day training course may facilitate better team engagement, but will they truly enhance the team’s ability to deliver product? That’s the crux of the matter.
What Businesses Care About: Ultimately, businesses want working, usable products that solve real problems. This is the outcome we should be striving to improve. Are we measuring whether Scrum Masters are genuinely contributing to this goal?
The Status Quo: A lack of basic skills among Scrum Masters often leads to an organisation’s stagnation. This is particularly concerning given that Scrum Masters are typically brought in to address the inherent challenges of software development. Building products that don’t yet exist is no small feat.
The Role of Scrum Masters in Product Delivery
To effectively support their teams, Scrum Masters must understand various aspects of product development, including:
- Philosophies of Product Building: Are we making the right bets?
- Feature Design: How do we design features that resonate with our customers?
- Engagement with the Business: How do we ensure alignment with broader business goals?
Without a solid grasp of these elements, Scrum Masters risk leading their teams into ineffective practices—think of team-building exercises like building bridges with spaghetti and straws. While these activities can foster camaraderie, they do little to enhance product delivery.
Maximising Impact Through Knowledge
The real impact a Scrum Master can have lies in their ability to elevate the team’s knowledge and skills. In Lean practices, for instance, reducing batch size can improve flow, but the most significant gains come from limiting work in progress (WIP).
Teaching New Skills: The most effective Scrum Masters focus on teaching their teams new skills and capabilities. This enables teams to build better products, test more effectively, and ultimately deliver higher quality outcomes.
Collaboration and Engineering Excellence: Once a team has mastered engineering practices and DevOps, the next step is to enhance collaboration. This is where the Scrum Master’s competence truly shines, leading to increased productivity and effectiveness.
Conclusion
Organisations are often hindered by the absence of Scrum Masters who fundamentally understand the work that needs to be done. It’s not enough to simply facilitate meetings or engage in team-building exercises. The most effective Scrum Masters are those who can bridge the gap between theory and practice, enabling their teams to thrive in a complex and ever-evolving landscape.
In my journey, I’ve seen firsthand how a knowledgeable Scrum Master can transform a team’s dynamics and output. It’s a reminder that competence is not just a nice-to-have; it’s essential for driving meaningful change and delivering value in today’s fast-paced environment.
When Scrum Masters don’t have an understanding of both the philosophies, theories, and practices within the context of the team, and an understanding of what the team does every day, the impact on those teams and those organisations is profound. They’re not going to improve. If you had a coach for a soccer team that didn’t understand soccer, had never played soccer, how effective would they be at coaching that team in the processes and practices that you need?
Now, immediately a bunch of folks are thinking, “But Ted Lasso did it.” You’ve got to remember Ted Lasso is a fictional character, and that fictional character runs off a script. The script works because of plot. So he’s a good coach, and a successful coach, sorry, because of plot, right? Not because it would work in the real world. Almost every successful coach for a sports team understands fundamentally how that sport works, the training, the specific training techniques that need to be done in order to maximise the capability of that team.
If they don’t, they have sub-coaches that help for a specific thing. Like, I think in American football, you have an offensive coach and a defensive coach, and then you probably have an overall coach. The overall coach might have a different skill set from the offensive and defensive coaches, but they have a fundamental understanding of the sport, its rules, the training techniques, the types of muscles that are used by the team, and how they can train those muscles to be as effective as possible. How they prevent injury, all of those sporty things.
And that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about the competence of Scrum Masters. They need to understand if they’re a Scrum Master for an engineering team, they need to understand all the engineering team things that the team needs to be able to learn, practice, and do change in order to become more effective. If that’s not there, they won’t change. If you have somebody who is just a professional coach, right, and perhaps taking a two-day Scrum Master class, typically what you will see is very little actual improvement in the team’s ability to deliver product.
They might be better at engaging with each other, but are they actually better at delivering product? Because that is what your business cares about. They want product. They want working, usable product that solves business problems. That’s what we’re here for. That’s what we’re paid for. That’s the outcome they want to improve. Have these Scrum Masters actually improved? Is that what we’re measuring at all?
The lack of basic skills around Scrum Masters results in an organisation’s continued status quo, which is likely an inability to deliver. This is why they brought in Scrum Masters in the first place, because building software is hard. Building products that don’t exist yet is hard. Are we making the right bets? Are we using the right philosophies in how we build our product, how we design our features, how we get our features in front of our customers, how we engage with the rest of the business? Without understanding all of those things, we’re not going to be able to help the team be effective.
We’re going to have them, I don’t know, I’m being facetious, sitting doing some Lego team-building exercises and perhaps building a bridge with spaghetti and straws, right? Which sure, might be great for a team-building exercise like Myers-Briggs. I’ve done some Myers-Briggs exercises with teams I’ve worked on for organisations I’ve worked with, and it’s a great team-building exercise, but it’s of no value for delivery.
There’s only so much you can help a team from the context of the team working together more effectively, but there’s a massive difference you can make by improving their knowledge. It’s like in Lean; you can make a certain amount of impact by looking at reducing batch size. If you make the work items smaller, you’re going to improve the flow. But your biggest bang for your buck is probably limiting WIP. That’s where the highest percentage of a Scrum Master helping a team comes in.
The biggest bang for your buck is that Scrum Master being able to teach the team new skills and capabilities that enable it to be more effective, enable it to build better products, to test more effectively, and have higher quality. These are the primary skills that you want your Scrum Master to have: knowledge and competence so that they can help the team.
Once all of those are awesome, perhaps at the same time, right? But once all of those are awesome, the biggest bang for our buck then becomes because the team is already awesome at engineering. They have the best DevOps practices; they have the best architectures they can in their product. They have the most effective engineering systems. Then, if we enable the team to collaborate more effectively, we’ll get more stuff, right? That’s a small percentage of the overall effectiveness, and we get that from competence.
So organisations are suffering because they don’t have Scrum Masters that fundamentally understand the work that needs to be done and how to enable that work to be more effective.
