tech·nic·al·ly agile

What Does an Ineffective Scrum Master’s Day Look Like?

Describes common behaviours of an ineffective Scrum Master, including excessive reporting, poor team engagement, misusing daily Scrums, and blocking team communication.

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Spotting an Ineffective Scrum Master’s Day

Have you ever stopped to ponder over the happenings in an ineffective Scrum Master ’s daily routine?

Let me share some insights and observations from the world of Agile.

Lost in Projects

An ineffective Scrum Master’s Day is likely flooded with report writing.  🚫

Which means they’re drowning in paperwork and not in progress.

Instead of actively engaging with their teams, they’re probably hunkered down, crafting graphs and disseminating them without much context.

Misdirected Daily Scrum

Their day might include popping into the daily Scrum, but not for the right reasons.  Instead of fostering an environment of collaboration, they might treat the Daily Scrum as a mere checkpoint.

It becomes a platform to receive a status update and, quite regrettably, even to berate the team for perceived lapses in speed.

Such a daily story is far from the principles of Agile!

It’s a miserable story if it’s a part of their daily narrative.

Building Walls, Not Bridges

An ineffective Scrum Master will become a barrier and not a bridge.

Rather than promoting open communication, this Scrum Master might be ensuring that nobody from the business interacts with the developers.  They aim to control and maintain that relationship, which can stagnate growth and synergy.

A controlling attempt to monopolize that relationship?  Certainly seems so.

The Gloomy Reality

Let’s not cloud over collaboration because it’s a bleak scenario for anyone collaborating with such an ineffective Scrum Master.  🌧️

But remember, identifying these behaviours is the first step in improving them. 

All these actions?  They cast a pretty dismal shadow for anyone working alongside such an ineffective Scrum Master.

Identifying these pitfalls is essential.

But here’s a twist – what if you could master the right Scrum approach?

Explore my Agile and Scrum courses, and let’s transform these ineffective habits together!

What did an effective Scrum Master’s day look like? Probably report writing, probably building some graphs and sending them out to people. Perhaps getting into the daily Scrum so they can get a status update from their team. And then berate them for not working fast enough; it’s probably part of their story. Perhaps they’re going to make sure that nobody from the business is talking to the developers so that they can control and maintain that relationship. It has a pretty dismal outlook there for anybody who works with this poor Scrum Master that I’ve come up with.

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