Scrum Master

The Scrum Master is one of the three fundamental Scrum parts in any company introducing Scrum.
Scrum Masters are appointed by Scrum roll out teams at Scrum kickoff meeting.
The Scrum Master's main role is to facilitate for both the Product Owner and Scrum Teams. Such person has no managing role and must present a certain type of personality – he or she must enjoy facilitating other's work. A Scrum Master must be a real team players and have to value someone else's success as much as their own. They can not be too independent people as they must surrender control to the Product Owner and feel comfortable with that fact. This are the reasons why good managers are not usually the best Scrum Masters. However, Scrum Masters are usually previous project managers so it is very important to refer to them as Scrum Masters to introduce new rules and change their conviction that they are responsible for the success of the project and have authority to tell people what to do.

Scrum master duties

Scrum Masters are very busy members of the staff and have various duties during Scrum introduction and further Sprints. First of all they remove any impediments that occur during Sprints and obstruct achieving the goals by the teams. To do so, they can do anything to increase teams' productivity, for example they may have to cope with broken office equipment or air conditioning failure, find a suitable workroom or a task board, monitor advancements of their team, monitor progress along the Sprint, promote Scrum ideas, monitor quality, help to find resources, get the team committed and help avoiding overcommitment, The ways to facilitate teams' work or increase their productivity can be infinite.

Problem resolution

All the problems that occur when a Scrum project is underway must be reported to a Scrum Master at least once a day during daily Scrum. Scrum Masters on development projects can also participate in the ETC daily Scrum to ask for help in removing important impediments to their team's progress if they can not solve the problems themselves. Some of these things can be fixed by the Scrum Master with only a little help from ETC team. Sometimes the Scrum Master might not have the authority or knowledge to fix others so the impediments have to be resolved by ETC team or are put in the TPB to be prioritized and resolved later.

Scrum Master does not only work for the team. He or she also helps the Product Owner to maximize productivity. To do so Scrum Master can help to maintain the backlog, set the priorities or make sure that the Product Owner is informed about Scrum Teams success or failure.