I know it can be very hectic as a Scrum Master and it's easy to get caught up in daily routine, you end up just turning the wheel, not on purpose, just because it's often difficult to find time to think.
But your number one responsibility is to help the team deliver value and positive outcomes to customers
So, what are you doing that directly contributes to team and organisation value? Let's talk about it.
Try and find a few minutes today to self assess what value you’re delivering, now really think about this, and what it might look like for you.
For example how is your relationship with your Product Owner? Are you finding time to help them with the backlog? Are you helping them to prioritise?
What techniques are you using? MoSCoW, weighted shortest job first, cost of delay, the Kano model, opportunity scoring? There are so many, but no matter what technique you're using, how do you know if it's working? What feedback are you getting from the end user or customers? So have a think about that.
Now helping the Product Owner with the backlog isn't just about prioritisation, what about the Product Vision, the Product Goal and how about that Roadmap. The backlog needs to be coherent with a purpose. This will make a huge difference to the team and helps them understand the Sprint Goal for each Sprint.
Without that you're putting the team in a difficult position and Sprints can end up with just a list of unrelated things to do which eventually sees the team working in silos.
Now does the Product Owner protect the backlog or do they just say yes to everything and tag it on to the bottom? I think you know what I'm talking about!
Look it's easy to say yes to everything but frankly that's just a cop out. Saying no or not now is much harder, so help them to understand why saying no is important not just to the team but to the organisation as well.
But help them to say no with supporting data which ties back into how you prioritise.
Now what about your stakeholders? When was the last time you sat down with them to build better relationships?
And what about data? Data that can help the team and wider organisation. I'm not talking about story points or burn down charts. No. Cycle time, flow efficiency calculations, work item age, forecasting with Monte Carlo Simulation, customer feedback, all of these things can directly benefit the team and organisation and show that you have value.
Also, think about how you can surface this data to the right people in an easy way, don't try and get stakeholders to navigate their way through Jira or whatever other tool you're using. Think about creating easy to use and find dashboards.
There are many tools out there to do this from eazyBI to Power BI so take the time to find out what your organisation has, learn it and use it, but don't duplicate data make sure it comes from source otherwise it'll go out of date quickly and be useless.
Now you're there to help the team but you're also there to help the organisation, so have to think about that. What can you do outside of the team to help the organisation and do you have a community of practice? If so get some material together and ask to present at the next catchup perhaps start with estimation or better still forecasting.
If not start one yourself, get a list of things you'd like to talk about maybe your favourite prioritisation techniques or retrospective formats and send it out. State that you'll present x y and z and ask for volunteers for the remaining items on your list.
You could also start some lunchtime learning sessions and invite other Scrum Masters, Product Owners and stakeholders.
Depending on where your organisation is on its road to agility a great place to start is to introduce Simon Powers Agile Onion and Agile Mindset now if you're not familiar with those check these links out.
Really the list of things you can do is endless but the point is to take time out to think about how you can deliver value to your team and organisation.
In 2024 being a Scrum Master is much more than just facilitating Scrum events, it always has been, but many have just gone through the motions and that simply won't cut it anymore. You need to be much more proactive than that.
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