Hello All,
In the ezine article Scrum Impediments, the author Laszlo Szalvay, President, Danube Technologies, Inc. discusses the vital role that the Scrum Master plays in ensuring team success through the elimination of impediments to an Agile-Scrum based project. The Scrum Master role is not the typical project manager role that we have become accustomed. This role, rather than focusing on just the mechanics of project management, planning and execution, is geared to being the ultimate team advocate, protector of team productivity, facilitator and communicator. This is not to say that a good project manager does not assume these roles. It is more to say that these are of primary importance in the Scrum Master role.
But what characteristics make for a great Scrum Master? A blog posting by Jim Trott on the website NetObjectives identifies 4 key characteristics that are present in a great Scrum Master. He states that the Scrum Master must:
- Be humble enough to serve the team;
- Have a strong character and be confident enough to stay in the background, promoting the team;
- Display a high degree of integrity and maintain a trusting relationship with all the team;
- Be politically savvy with a strong relationship with the Product Owner, and;
- Be able to understand both business and technical people.
It has been my experience that the more traditional project manager has a difficult time adapting to the role of Scrum Master. Command and control is the modus operandi in traditional projects and project managers have been indoctrinated within this paradigm. But with Agile and in particular, Scrum, self managing teams are the norm. This requires a unique mindset. The Scrum Master must serve the team as a coach. They must not direct, but rather facilitate team self management. They must function as a single voice to the business and technical community on behalf of the team. They must protect the team from extraneous “project noise”. They must be motivators and must always cultivate an environment of trust and good faith. They must have the courage to stand up to the business and IT community to ensure that the principles of agile are being upheld, that short cuts or hybrid models don’t begin to emerge due to executive management pressures and that the team is shielded from politics and bureaucracy.
What has your experience been? If you have had (or are) a particularly strong Scrum Master, what made them (or you) stand out? If you have had the opposite experience, what were the weaknesses that should have been identified before putting the person in that position?
As always, I look forward to your comments. You can post your comment here or you can email me at Pete@TheDeYoes.com.
Have a great day!
Pete
Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/peterdeyoe
The qualities you mention are the qualities I always expect in a Project Manager. Your assumption that a Project Manager is in Command and Control mode is I think quite short sighted and anyway an example of bad project management.
So what is a Scrum Master supposed to be? Just to be a good Project Manager.
This leads to the question how a two day course can produce a good Scrum Master…
Niels Malotaux, Project Coach (not Agile Coach because Agile doesn’t need coaching. Projects do).
Niels,
Thanks for the feed back. My position is this…if the final conclusion is that in fact a good Project Manager possess all of the same qualities, then that is great and in fact a welcomed conclusion. I don’t mean to come off as short-sghted, but I do believe traditional PM is more command and control driven and Scrum is not a command and control world. I have seen too many traditional PMs having trouble with the idea of self managed teams and the lack of top-down control. However, with enough time and training they can flourish and even excel as Scrum Masters. And as you stated…how does a 2 day course produce a good scrum master – I AGREE! Again, thanks for your great comments.
Pete
Hello. I am a “traditional Project Manager” and for the last 11 months have been doing the role of Scrum Master (I wouldn’t call myself a master after after such a short time). I agree with Neils that I have always seen most of the PM role as removing obstacles, managing risks and issues and fostering the right environment for the team members to do their jobs. I find it quite liberating to not do (as much of)the “command and control” stuff like managing schedules and allocating tasks as I always found that very mechanical and the least satisfying component of project management.
Isi,
Based on the posts so far, it is clear that it is all about the “right” person and not necessarily what specific discipline that they were accustomed to. With the right amount of indoctrination in the Agile Scrum principles a “traditional” project manager can overcome the command and control mentality and be “liberated” as you say into the role of Scrum Master.
Thanks for your inputs and contribution to this discussion.
Pete
http://www.peterdeyoe.wordpress.com
Hi Pete,
Thanks for raising a good point. I started off in the traditional waterfall environmnent as a dyed-in-the wool PRINCE2 PM. For me, the most enjoyable part of the job was the interaction with the project team members. I came to Scrum quite late (about a couple of years ago) and have been watching and listening in the background since then, and start my CSM course tomorrow – and I agree that this does not make me a Certified SM, but instead is an opportunity to learn more about Scrum and meet like-minded people and hear about their experiences – I know I have a long way to go before I would call myself a strong SM.
The point I’d like to raise is the level of technical knowledge a PM or CSM needs to fulfil the role. I’ve managed a number of IT projects over the past 12 years; the majority have been successful, but some have crashed and burned! But I have a very limited technical background. I came from an operational business background into project management. So it could by said that my lack of technical knowledge & experience is a constraint and it would be easy for the technical guys to pull the wool over my eyes. But I’m open and honest about my technical limitations – my team know that I will ask the dumb questions and will probably not understand the deep technical issues. And I’ve found that this hasn’t held me back; indeed in the Scrum Master role it’s been an advantage. I’ve been able to focus on removing impediments and ensuring that everyone follows the Scrum framework, leaving the team to manage the technical delivery. So, my personal experience has been that the transition from traditional PM to Scrum Master has been relatively easy for me – but perhaps that’s because I have a career history of managing people and have little technical knowledge.
So I’d be really interested to hear others’ thoughts on whether a Scrum Master needs to be an ex-techie. Reading most of the job adverts you would think so – in which case maybe my days are numbered!
Great article by the way – keep them coming!
Paul
Thanks Paul. Personally I do not think the Scrum Master needs to be the most technical person on the team. I think as long as the Scrum Master surrounds themselves with people they trust that should bridge the technical gap. What we have typically done is to have a senior technical person on the team that can be the guide, mentor for the project team. This is usually someone that I have worked with for a while and that can represent the technical aspects of the project as the Scrum progresses.
Good luck with the certification class.
Pete
http://www.peterdeyoe.wordpress.com
We have a Project. And we have a Project Team that took the responsibility to make the project a success. There should be one captain on the ship, who ultimately makes the decisions (or makes sure the right decisions are made) and who ultimately is responsible for the success of the project and hence of the team, even if we have an empowered team. If you like to call this person the Scrum Master, the Team Leader, the Project Manager or whatever else is OK with me, but if we call this person the Project Manager, at least we know what we’re talking about, as he/she’s managing the project. I’m not talking about amateurs who make the project fail and have all the excuses why it’s the fault of others. I’m talking about real Project Managers, who simply make sure that the project is successful. To me the term Scrum Master disguises what this person really is doing as only insiders (who have been initiated in Scrum Terminology, some by paying for a course in this terminology) think that this person is doing what a good Project Manager should be doing all along. They only call it other names. And when the Scrum hype is dying out, we may have Lean Masters or Kanban Black Belts. I’m using the term Evolutionary Project Management as a way to make projects successful, but what we call it isn’t the issue, as long as we make sure our project is producing the right results in the shortest possible time, wasting a little as possible, which isn’t always the case with Scrum projects either.
So, again, if you like to call the person a Scrum Master, it’s OK with me, but I rather keep using the term Project Manager, so that more people understand what we’re talking about. If we then have to discuss what a real professional Project Manager does in order to secure success of the project he/she is managing, we can talk about that.
As for the case if the Project Manager doesn’t know about the technical details of the project, he should have an Architect (in other circles called the Systems Engineer), who ultimately is responsible that the project produces the optimum (effective, efficient) product. The decisions made in the design of the result of the project (the product) greatly affect the cost of the product as well as the cost and duration of the project, so this function isn’t to be taken lightly.
Thanks again for your insights Niels. Very helpful!
Pete
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Thanks for posting. As a Project Manager, the things I find most enjoyable and fitting to my personality are facilitation, coordinating efforts, and maintaining effective relationships with people at all organizational levels. Sounds like Scrum Master is right up my alley!
[...] article I wrote on The Personality of a Great Scrum Master has received a fair amount of attention. In fact between the discussion threads I started in my [...]
I actually agree with others on this thread that a seasoned Project Manager should exhibit these traits anyway. Whether or not they subscribe to Scrum (or any other methodology or practice) should be a secondary or tertiary consideration. But in referring to traits such as humility, leadership, character, and integrity, in addition to the knowledge of the initiative at hand, what is really referenced is a listing of project success criteria versus the requirements list for entry into one set of practices.
The traits that were referenced, in addition to strong facilitation, planning, and communication skills, were ones that I demanded in the PM teams that I’ve led during my career, whether or not we used a SCRUM approach to an initiative. These, in my view, are the traits we should be demanding and expecting from our profession, and by not doing so, we only undermine the overall relevance of Project Management as facilitating organizational strategy.
Thanks for a thought-provoking post.
Andy
Hi,
As someone who has been both a “traditional” project manager and who is now someone who travels the world training people about “Scrum” and working with projects that are in trouble, I agree with most of what you say.
As a ScrumMaster, even *I* have problems not going into the “command and control” mode. This takes constant introspection and discipline, and is something that does not come naturally to me.
That being said, I think that if a person is a “ScrumMaster” or “Traditional Project Manager” — I see that the good ones (whatever they want to call themselves) are REALLY good. And the poor ones (again, as a ScrumMaster or otherwise) suck and hurt the team overall.
Thanks for the blog posting and bringing this up. It is something I talk a lot about in my classes and with my clients around the world.
- mike vizdos
http://www.michaelvizdos.com
http://www.implementingscrum.com
Thanks Mike. I appreciate the comment and the valuable insight. I am working on an article that summarizes what the respondents have said re: this article.
Pete
[...] this week on the discussion board for this blog. There were over 20 comments made on the article The Personality of a Great Scrum Master. In the article I offered some suggestions as to the personality traits that a great Scrum Master [...]
Hello Peter,
Thanks for pointing to my Ezines article. Here’s more from Kane Mar on selecting a Scrum Master – http://blogs.danube.com/selecting-scrummasters-facilitators
also see his general framework for agile roles and responsibilities –
http://blogs.danube.com/a-generalized-framework-for-agile-roles-and-responsibilities
Hope that helps!
Thanks Laszlo for visiting my blog and for the information. I hope you can get a chance to come back again to contribute.
Pete