Organizations are moving towards agile methodology from traditional software development methodologies. When you say Agile methodology, the first thing you think of is Agile Scrum. Scrum is based on agile and revolves around it. A Scrum Master is a professional in Scrum. This. When you are working on a project, making mistakes are more common. Mistakes should be taken as positive and helpful for learning from them. While working on Agile projects, people are allowed to make mistakes and gain knowledge from them. Once a mistake is made, the possible ways to overcome the mistake should be analyzed and applied. This blog will detail the most common mistakes that Scrum Masters will make and how they can use to overcome them.
Scrum Master is the facilitator of Scrum teams and is prone to make mistakes. CSM Online Training is a framework of choice for organizations interested in achieving Agile transformation and Scrum Master is a well-established, critical player in product development at the world’s leading companies.
What is Scrum?
Scrum is a framework based on agile development methodology where the software development is made in iterative and incremental processes. It is an agile framework that is flexible, and fast, and helps deliver customer expectations on time. The prime goal of the scrum framework is to satisfy the customers’ requirements with effective communication, transparency, continuous progress, etc.
Scrum framework helps in easily managing the complex development process that takes a long time. As per the requirements, scrum teams can self-organize and adapt to the changes. Scrum is a lightweight framework with three roles in priority. They are Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Developers. Scrum has multiple teams where there will not be any sub-teams under it. All scrum teams will be focusing on a single goal or the objectives of the product.
What is a Scrum Master?
The scrum master is responsible for the project team following the Scrum framework. They help the team understand Scrum and practice in larger and more complex projects. They should handle the scrum team’s effectiveness and serve the scrum team with several roles involved in the scrum team. Scrum Master coaches the team for self-management based on agile principles. They remove project impediments at the very earlier stages to avoid challenges in the future. Finally, the scrum master will maintain and train the scrum teams to achieve the primary goal, which is customer satisfaction.
Common Mistakes of a Scrum Master
Though Scrum Master is the facilitator of Scrum by implementing the scum practices, there are chances of making mistakes that will impact hugely. The scrum master is responsible for the Scrum team and hence should be aware of these mistakes to avoid them in the future. The following are some of the common mistakes by Scrum Masters. The blog will explain every mistake of scrum masters and ways to avoid them.
Avoiding Daily Scrum Meetings
One of Agile Software development’s most common and essential practices is daily standups or scrum meetings. Before starting the day’s work, daily standups will be conducted where team members gather and address their previous and current tasks. These meetings will be highly helpful for better communication among the team members and effective collaboration. The teams could easily achieve the visibility and transparency of the task by spending some 10 to 15 minutes with the team. All the team members must attend the scrum meeting without fail. Every team member should address the past activities and the plan for the day. It is for the team, and the scrum master does not have to interfere much in the meeting. Thus, the scrum master is the daily scrum team meetings facilitator.
Most of the time, Scrum Masters will be skipping this Scrum meeting. The teams must conduct Scrum daily for a short period where team members gather together and address their activities. Every team member should keep following the three questions in the Daily Standup are,
- What did I do yesterday?
- What have I planned today?
- Are there any issues?
These questions look very simple, but the team members and the managers could understand the flow of the task and the issues prevailing in it. As a result, teams will benefit from conducting the daily scrum meetings. Some of the advantages guaranteed with this are better communication, understanding of team goals, improved team collaboration, continuous improvement, continuous integration, and continuous monitoring.
Not Understanding the Difference Between Scrum Master and Team Manager
The role of the scrum master is not the same as project manager. Here is what every scrum master confuses. As discussed earlier, the scrum master is just a facilitator of the Scrum and not the project owner. The framework already defines the roles of the Scrum master. Despite this, the project manager’s role is something different where he has command and control over the entire project team members. The project managers will only assign tasks and control the team members working on the allocated tasks.
The scrum team is a self-organized and self-managed team that takes ownership of the tasks they perform. Scrum Master, in other terms, will be called a servant leader. They will help the team whenever the team is facing any issue in the project. The regular work on the Scrum master is to deal with the challenges identified by the scrum team and solve them effectively.
The Scrum master should understand the role properly and work accordingly to avoid these mistakes. They should understand the scrum framework initially and plan the work accordingly. As a scrum master, You should not control the team but provide potential solutions and support to resolve any issue. Scum master can help the team members learn from their experiences with kind support, encouragement, and mentorship. They should encourage communication and collaboration among the teams to develop scrum values. Continuous improvement is essential in Scrum, and hence Scrum master should help out the team with that. To understand and protect the team and organization from external obstacles in the projects.
Not Practicing Agile Principles
Agile principles are the basic ideas behind the Scrum framework. A Scrum master must follow agile practices and principles, and also following agile principles is also necessary. It is because that agility is the idea behind implementing a scrum framework with which continuous development and delivery are possible. It is achieved through following the agile principles. To become sustainable in the projects, following the Scrum and agile principles is essential. Agile principles are for the people, culture, and interactions made among the team and do not have any dealing with tools and processes. Scrum teams are thus advised to follow the agile principles for making the better interactions among the team.
The vision of the project is achieved by following agile principles. Agile principles will discuss the tasks and ask to achieve them without providing other solutions. The core values of Agile are:
- Interactions among individuals.
- Collaborating with the customer.
- Accepting and responding to the changes.
- Achieving the software development on time.
It can thus understand that agile principles will help achieve better communication among teams part of Scrum teams. To avoid interaction issues and take the scrum team effectively, scrum masters should follow the agile principles in their teams. Awareness of following these principles is required among the team members.
Making the Team Decisions
Decision-making makes the most discomfort for most of the teammates. If the decision fails, they have to bear the consequences. Project managers are the decision-makers in the project. Most scrum masters are right decision-makers on their own. It is because they might have previous experiences in making the decisions. But, this is not the case here, as the taking decisions by scrum masters are completely wrong here. Also, the team members will approach the scrum masters regarding making the decisions. While following the agile principles, opinions and feedback are collected from different persons in the team before making decisions. Scrum masters making the decisions will look like the traditional software development model where only project managers make the decisions. Making the decisions by scrum masters will entirely affect their role.
Scrum masters are expected to encourage and mentor the teams to achieve the better possible solutions to the task. But making the decisions will take you to sit in the controlling position. You should not focus on making the right decisions but work to complete the already taken decisions. You must encourage team members to make decisions independently.
It will enhance their skills and responsibilities. In this way, you can guide and facilitate the team. There will be chances of mistakes from the team, which are acceptable. Allow them to make mistakes and gain experiences from the mistakes. Scrum masters must guide learning from the mistakes and reflect this learning in a future project.
Ignoring or Not Caring About the Obstacles
Following agile principles will help you out in Scrum team management. In Scrum teams, the identified obstacles should be addressed and removed initially. It ensures the project will not face serious issues at delivery. While following Agile principles, you will manage these obstacles with impediment removal concepts.
To do so, the Scrum master should not take sole responsibility for solving the obstacles from the project. Instead, the teams should be asked to take care of the obstacles so that they will understand them and find out the ways to resolve them. It also helps them avoid those obstacles in the future. If any obstacles arise in future projects, teams can resolve them with effective solutions. The cost and time of the project will increase if you are not ready to solve the impediments at the very beginning. It will also impact the quality of the product.
To avoid this issue, the Scrum master should take sole responsibility for identifying the obstacles in the project. Discussing the daily process and plan in the daily standups should include any challenges identified. The importance of obstacles in the scrum project should be advised and create awareness among the team to understand its consequences. It is also good to stop and delay the work to resolve the obstacles in the project rather than continue with them.
Being the Team Assistant
Being the team assistant is the most common mistake that the Scrum masters make in the project. We have studied that the Scrum Master is the servant leader responsible for helping the team in the case of any obstacles. Most of the scrum masters are wrongly assuming that their role is only to assist the team members to resolve the aroused obstacles. Scrum masters acting as the assistant of the team members in solving their complexities will not work. The team members will not be able to solve the obstacles independently in the future, hence creating risks.
People then always rely on the scrum master for solving the problem they are facing. Several obstacles will arise as the scrum master will not resolve the obstacles of all the team members. Helping the team members is a role of the Scrum Master, but team members should not always wait for the scrum master to solve the problem. The confidence and decision-making skills of the team members will reduce if the scrum master acts as a team assistant. A scrum master should create awareness among the team members on the problem. You should encourage and motivate the team to solve with their strategies. Providing the nod to solving the issues themselves will improve their skills, knowledge, and confidence to solve the problem. Developing the self-organizing teams to solve the problems on their own is a good idea.
Higher Workloads on a Scrum Team
It is one of the other mistakes that the Scrum Masters make. The entire scrum project is split sprints and will work based on the time-boxing of activities. Time-boxing is to provide the deadline of the tasks, events, and other activities performed by the team. The task or event that is not limited to this workload is considered a higher workload, and they cannot manage to complete their daily tasks on time.
Scrum aims to manage the tasks as per the acceptable load and provide the minimum duration to complete the tasks on time. The delays in the project tasks are because of problems arising in software development.
For overcoming the problems identified, the focus should be on the workload provided to the team members. The daily scrum meetings or standup should discuss the delays caused in completing the task. Each meeting should discuss the time-boxing that is provided. The issues on the time and workload should discuss separately in a meeting. Scum masters should always work with the teams to understand the workload provided and ask for suggestions and feedback. Scrum masters should not encourage to try the next sprint until the current sprint is completed.
Taking Care of Project Delivery
Scrum Master is not responsible for delivering the software projects to the customers or dealing with the customers. The reason behind this is that the project manager is the sole person responsible for taking care of the delivery of the project and the scrum master is responsible for the completion of the given scrum tasks. The scrum master should ensure that the scrum terms deal with their tasks successfully by overcoming any issues or obstacles. A scrum master will have to create strategies for motivation and ways the team members are always following scrum practices. They help team members to improve the performance and quality of the development.
All of this would be helpful in the scrum task completion, and hence project manager can take care of the delivery. However, scrum masters taking care of the delivery of the project will not be much effective as there will not be any previous communication with the customer regarding the project. Therefore, the scrum master is not advised to look after project delivery to avoid these issues.
Scrum masters should only motivate the teams to improve the productive nature of the teams. They should monitor the scrum teams closely for any issues arising in the project. Early detection of obstacles in the project will thus improve the quality of the developed product. Scrum masters must ensure the developers are working towards the requirements of the product. Even in the case of delivery, the scrum master will have to look into the delivery of the product rather than verify the quality of the developed product. Collaborative planning by the team members with proper communication and collaboration will reduce any errors and deliver the product of scheduled time and quality.
Being a Technical Expert
If you are a technical expert in the projects, then there are chances that you will deliver the solutions easily to the team members. It will surely help complete the sprints on time and with better quality. But, as a scrum master, You should not assist people with the known technical solutions. Scrum master is only responsible for providing motivation and suggestions for the team members to complete the tasks allocated. Being a technical expert makes the team people rely on scrum masters.
The team members are responsible for managing and finding better solutions for technical issues. They will have to identify the solution so that it will be helpful for them in resolving future concerns. This problem will occur in projects because scrum masters might be senior developers or experienced team members with great skills. They will have the mindset of resolving the issues with their skills and knowledge. But that will cause the teams to revolve around the scrum master for any obstacles identified.
To overcome this problem in the projects, scrum masters should always focus on completing the sprints in the team. They can only work closely with the team to encourage and motivate them to find better solutions for the team. Their role is similar to the game coach, where only instructions are provided rather than playing the game. The scrum master should trust the progress and ensure that the team members can resolve the issues independently. It will improve the agile mindset and assist in building self-managed and self-motivated teams. The agility in the projects will also improve by following the scrum activities with a proper scrum master.
Do You Believe in Scrum?
Apart from all other mistakes, the most serious mistake that all the scrum masters make is not believing in Scrum and its output. Scrum framework is for the development and delivery of projects on time and with better quality. As a scrum master, not believing in Scrum will cause negative consequences to the team members. Scrum is mainly based on the core principles followed in the scrum teams. The core principles of Scrum are self-organization, time-boxing, making priorities based on values, collaboration, effective communication, and controlling the progress. Therefore, scrum masters and scrum teams should believe in the core principles of the scrum.
For believing in Scrum, a scrum master should trust the team. In the complex environment and projects, Scrum will be highly helpful and assist in the development. The plan for the project should complete on time with better quality. It should be the main goal of the scrum master without focusing on the tasks the team is performing. The product goal and sprint goal must be the highest priority for the scrum master.
You can achieve the project or the product goal by completing every sprint goal without obstacles and time delays. Self-motivation and self-management will improve when the team focuses on the sprint goal. The scrum master must allow team members to make mistakes and learn from them in such an environment. Scrum masters trust the team, and they can rectify their mistakes and overcome them with higher confidence. All these could help develop the product based on Scrum and agile principles.
Conclusion
The mistakes mentioned above are the most common mistakes by the scrum masters. Every scrum master should be aware of these mistakes and ways to avoid them in future projects. The teams and scrum master should believe in Scrum and trust the progress of the development. These mistakes are dangerous for scrum masters, and they should focus on avoiding them. The team will achieve the goals with the assistance of the scrum master. The assistance should be in progress and not in the development or any technical instances.
Apart from all, the main role of the scrum master is to coach and encourage the team members. The daily standups help to understand how teams flow in the development cycle. It helps in identifying the obstacles arising in the project. The teams should follow the practices and principles of Scrum.
Development, Deployment, and Delivery are not the processes for scrum master but rather to coach and motivate the team to work on scrum practices. Scrum masters should focus on Self-management, self-organization, and agility of the team.
Do you want to learn more about Scrum master? Visit the CSM Online Training Course to learn and understand more about Scrum masters and their roles. With this training, you will learn to work on scrum teams to solve complex problems in an organization. Also, check out our website to learn more to upskill yourself. With experienced trainers and useful materials, Invensis Learning assures you a better pass percentage.
