What Is The Most Crucial Task Of A Scrum Master?
It’s all about flow
Now and then, clients ask me: “What is the most important task of a Scrum Master?” Of course, the people who ask me expect answers like “the Retrospective,” “facilitating Scrum Events,” “conducting training,” etc. But there are more important things. The most important task is to optimize the flow.
The Scrum Guide says:
“The Scrum Master is accountable for the Scrum Team’s effectiveness.”
And it is precisely this task that the Scrum Master fulfills by optimizing the flow.
Approaches to improve the flow
1. Reduce work in progress (WIP) This principle is more familiar from Kanban, but you can also use it within Scrum. As a Scrum Team, consider how many items may be worked on simultaneously. A low WIP limit helps to focus and to finish the started things. Vary the WIP limit from Sprint to Sprint and reflect on it in the Retrospective until you have found your optimal limit. Coach the team on how to work together and help each other.
2. Avoid context switching When team members cannot focus on one task but switch back and forth between multiple contexts, it slows down the work process and creates stress. Help the team avoid that. For example, it could help to have the Sprint Events (Review, Retrospective, Planning) all scheduled for one day and not spread over two days. In addition, if some firefighting (urgent bug-fixing) is necessary, the team could assign dedicated people for one Sprint to these tasks.
3. Avoiding hand-offs Sometimes the Scrum Team starts items, but another department has to decide or deliver something, and the Scrum Team waits for feedback. The item is then blocked. As Scrum Master, it would be best to look closely at these waiting times. It is not easy to eliminate them. But maybe some tasks could be done entirely by the team, or the cooperation with other groups could be improved.
4. Keep the batch sizes small Try to make the backlog items as small as possible. The flow is significantly better when smaller items are processed and completed because the cycle time is shorter. With a smaller size also, the risk decreases. For example, if the team only works on one big user story in a sprint and something unforeseen happens, they are likely unable to deliver anything. With ten small user stories, the risk is lower. Something unexpected may occur, and 1 or 2 Stories are not finished, but 8–9 could be delivered.
All four principles affect the cycle time. Therefore, the goal should be to create a workflow where the team can deliver results quickly. That has the advantage that feedback can also flow in quickly.
As a Scrum Master, you can control and optimize so much through the flow. If you are new to a team, look closely at the workflow at the beginning. In many cases, you can leverage optimization potential here.