On being an engineer & half time scrum master
Why having part time Scrum Masters?
Growing Teams
Growing teams will reach the limit proposed by Scrum (maximum 9 members of the dev-team) so eventually the team should be split. That means that each team will require their own scrum master.
One solution can be just hiring a new full-time scrum master, but often while attempting to train new scrum masters inside the team, one approach is to assign the duties of the scrum master to one member.
Partial Scrum Implementation
Other possible scenario could be the case of a non Scrum team trying to implement Scrum without having one person assigned full-time to the role.
These practices could carry some issues that I’m going to analyze next, including one simple solution.
Conflict between previous role and new one
Scrum is easy to “understand” but hard to “master”:
Michael James: “A good Scrum Master can have two teams, a great Scrum Master will only have one team.”
Easy to understand means that the theory is pretty simple, so learning the rules and apply them is something achievable with some effort. The hard part is to make progress with it. To master the framework one key concept to understand is the “Servant leadership” that can be summarized as:
Instead of assigning tasks and checking progress, inspire the team members to take control and embrace the self-organization of the team.
That will require patience, listening, coaching and practice.
When you discover something that needs improvement, one common mistake is to take shortcuts and “point out what is going wrong”. Instead of doing that, we should allow the team to use the proper tools to analyze their work and perform the adjustments required.
Conflict of interests
Being part of the dev-team and being Scrum Master of the Scrum Team at the same time will result in a huge effort. Mainly because you as a team member should work actively to complete the everyday work, proposing ideas, supporting colleagues and exposing what is being doing well and what is being doing wrong.
But as a scrum master, your role is much more silent, flying low, remembering to “see the wood instead of the tree”, observing possible issues but giving the time to the team to auto solve them.
Proposed Solution
If you are in a scrum dev team and you will start the journey to become a scrum master one healthy choice could be to start as a “Cross team Scrum Master”. In that way we can separate the roles and be clear of the commitments with each team you are member.
Cross team Scrum Master
- Pros:
- Easy to switch “hats” (roles)
- Easy to be the referee (mediate conflicts)
- Easy to understand when to give opinion: a Scrum master should not talk about technical decisions, a developer should.
- Clean point of view.
- Clear negotiation with the PO, impartial.
- “Do through others”
- Cons:
- Less time in general:
- To learn about scrum, as you may know reading, training and improving is a never ending task.
- Remember that belonging to two teams can double the time spent on meetings.
- The Scrum Master lose awareness of how the team is interacting, which makes coaching more difficult.
- Tasks mechanization, as Scrum Master is possible that you will only have time to facilitate the meetings and nothing more.
- Less time in general:
Final thought: This is not a “silver bullet” is just a proposed configuration to mitigate some of the issues created while sharing roles, please fell free to take what you consider useful.