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Chapter 03 - Scrum Aspects

6. Scrum Master Responsibilities

When you look at the specific responsibilities that we're going to ask of you as the Scrum Master, this begins with teaching and coaching the various Scrum practices. Many of the members of your Scrum team will be unfamiliar with our meetings, with timeboxing, with the idea of self-organization, and with the collection and collaboration activities associated with a very closely working Scrum team in a war room. And so we want to be able to consistently remind them of both the practises and the reasons for the practises, to help coach them in their effective use. Finally, we want to enable the team to find their own way in facilitating change, helping them improve their overall performance, identifying potential improvements, removing impediments to their progress, and protecting the team from interruptions or disruptions during their sprints. One of our roles as guides is to challenge the team to seek out better performance and look for specific opportunities to drive better value and better collaboration, to leverage all of the team's capabilities to produce value for the customer.

7. Scrum Master Authority

Now, one of the things that makes being a scrum master both wonderfully fun and challenging is that your authority is largely indirect. Unlike traditional project management, where the members of theteam work for the project manager, in a Scrumenvironment, the Scrum team is is the one responsiblefor the production of the deliverables. And the role of the Scrum Master is influential. How in fact is it that wecan help the team be successful? So the role here is very much one of advocate for the team and of facilitator for the team's ability to perform in the most optimal way. Our influence tends to come from our deep knowledge and awareness of Scrum principles and practices, and we ensure that those practises are effectively leveraged in the organisation and in the work of our teams. That said, we have no authority at all to make decisions on behalf of the team. So part of our job is to create the environment where appropriate. Self-organization can lead to a high level of authority and accountability for the team, for its own actions, and for its own deliverables.

8. Identify the Product Owner

Another of the key roles that needs to be identified for each Scrum team is that of the product owner. The Scrum Product Owner is explicitly responsible for ensuring the business value of the solutions that the Scrum Team produces. So in that job, they're responsible for articulating customer requirements and for serving as the ongoing voice of the customer. In order for us to be able to prioritise efforts based on the listing of solutions and features required in the prioritised product backlog, it's the job of the product owner to organise our ability to gather requirements. But we, as the Scrum Master, may then support them by facilitating requirements sessions, various types of user group identifications, and prioritisation activities.

9. Product Owner Responsibilities

The product owner is explicitly responsible, not for the solution itself but for ensuring that the solution is, in fact, properly aligned with business goals and objectives. So the product owner is responsible for having appropriate visibility into the customer needs, into the markets in which that solution is supposed to serve, and for being able to work together to create an appropriate vision for why the project exists and what the project is supposed to deliver along the way. We will collaborate with our stakeholders to create and/or maintain the product backlog, to collaborate for the Twisted Team on the various activities within a sprint, and to facilitate appropriate collaboration and participation with other key stakeholders, both in terms of identifying potential user stories and epics and also in terms of coordinating Sprint reviews and obtaining buy-in and commitment. The product owner is responsible for participating in the Sprint meetings and the Sprint review, and they may optionally participate in the daily stand-up meeting and in the Sprint retrospective if invited by the team.

10. Product Owner Authorities

The most important thing a product owner is asked to do within Scrum is to take full ownership of the product backlog, and most especially the prioritisation of the product backlog, because we want to be able to use that to prioritise in a value-driven way what things the team works on first, because one of the fundamental principles of Scrum is early delivery of value. We want to make sure that we are focusing on the deliverables that are going to drive the most value for the customer as soon as we can. The product owner is responsible for determining when the various deliverables that come out of each of the sprints will ultimately be released to customers based on an agreed release plan. This should reflect the appropriate requirements foreffort for the team and in particularmust not violate a particular Sprint. Once a sprint has been agreed upon and the sprint team is working on it, the product owner may not change any of the scope of the sprint unless they specifically want to cancel the whole sprint, because no value can be achieved from any of the things that the team is working on. And that happens very, very, very seldom. We want to have for any particular product one specific, single, accountable product owner. Not a committee, but one owner who's ultimately on the hook for making decisions as the voice of the customer about how exactly it is that we're reprioritizing the product backlog for use. And the organization's organisational authority under the product owner is very important. They must be able to make appropriate decisions about the product and the product's priorities in order to ensure that we deliver the appropriate return on investment for the efforts of the Scrumpty.

11. Forming the Scrum Team

The next key activity associated with establishing your scrum is establishing your team. Now, keep in mind that when we're serving as a Scrum master, we're serving a cross-functional team of people, and they're really the ones who are going to be on the hook for delivering whole working solutions to customer user stories. This includes being able to develop, test, integrate, and document the solutions in question. And so you want to ensure that the teams that are formed have the appropriate skill sets to be able to deliver whole, working solutions together. In addition, you want a Scrum team that's going to work collaboratively and work well together. You're looking for people who are creative and independent thinkers. who are going to be motivated to take accountability for the production of solutions together with their teammates that are focused not just on the production of code or testing activities. But how exactly those user stories are driving value back to the customer, and how they are ultimately able to be successful in an environment where they are expected to collaborate with a diverse range of other customers and stakeholders to ensure ongoing alignment and team activity is successful. A typical Scrum team generally numbers six to ten people. Most of the teams that I've run in the past have had about six to eight people. I think that tends to be about the right number. The biggest challenge you want to think about is how I ensure I have the right combination of skills so that I can deliver whole working solutions while at the same time having enough cross-functional flexibility to enable different people to be working on things at the same time and to be able to do that in a way that maximises the productivity of the team and produces user stories.