The last couple of years I’ve seen an increase in job offerings for Scrum masters here in Sweden. The title of these adverts more often than not include the text “Scrum master”. This shows that the market is adapting more and more to the need for agile methodologies, and Scrum in particular. And this is of course great news, but…
Lately I’ve started to read these adverts more thoroughly and have found that none of them are for a position as a fulltime Scrum master. There’s always some sort of mix, e.g. project manager, technical lead, systems architect, team manager, developer. And after additional analysis it’s also clear that very few of these positions put Scrum master as the primary task. Rather, it is more often expressed as “we’re looking for a senior developer that has the ability to lead our development team in Scrum”.
This is troublesome since this indicates that the market is still missing the point of the Scrum master.
I believe I can see the events that lead up to the point where the organisation decides to search to employ a Scrum master. So, story time…
It starts with someone not being happy with how and what the developers (and/or the rest of the IT-department) deliver; this someone is probably a boss-like person. The developers, eager to solve problems, have heard of this thing called Scrum and they suggest trying that, the boss-like person probably responds with “Fine! Just fix it!”. One developer takes some sort of responsibility on learning Scrum, perhaps even attends a Scrum master course with approved certification.
Now the pretty inexperienced Scrum team tries to get all of the mechanics to work, and probably hits close to every snag there is on the way. At this point the boss-like person has perhaps been convinced that Scrum is the way to go, but still isn’t happy with the team delivery. And now is that pivotal moment… the moment when an organisation junior to Scrum decides to hire an experienced Scrum master. But nobody’s really sure what traits an experienced Scrum master should have. Perhaps the thinking is something like this; a Scrum master doesn’t add measurable value, thus this person needs to have knowledge in things we at the organisation value, i.e. technical skills. Normally a senior developer has the sought after skills, and then we add Scrum as a requirement since that’s what we really wanted in the first place, even though we’re still not sure what it really is.
So, why is this troublesome? Should a Scrum master not have technical skills? A Scrum master with technical skills is great, especially since this will help in understanding the work the team is doing. But the existence of technical skills is beside the point. The troublesome issue at hand are priorities.
Scrum is about priority, a Scrum master works tirelessly with priority and to clear impediments obstructing set priority. If this person is supposed to work as a senior developer at the same time as being a Scrum master then the work as developer will be an impediment for the rest of the team since their impediments won’t be removed as swiftly as possible. And, on the other hand, the Scrum master will often be interrupted which will make the development delivery from that person suffer.
TL;DR: Let Scrum masters be Scrum masters!