The Scrum Master as a Square Peg

Your scrum master is a square peg.

I have said repeatedly agile is a reformation to the business world.  It is not an uprising with torches and pitchforks.  It is a smart and conscientious people seeking reform and the abolition of corruption in business.  It is thankless work. Today on the blog, I would like to talk about the job and how it requires devotion to be successful.

The scrum guide makes the role of scrum master sound easy to fill.  A scrum master is a servant leader.  A scrum master is a person who promotes and supports scrum in the organization.  Finally, they help others understand what helps and interferes with the delivery of solutions.  It sounds simple but is a career fraught with peril.  A scrum master is often a misfit inside the organization doing what they need to do to get work done.

A scrum master ruffles feathers daily.  It means being on the phone, making sure network permissions are correct.  It is attending a meeting so the development team can concentrate on delivering value.  A person in the job spends plenty of time asking uncomfortable questions and does not accept, “…because we have always done it that way,” for an answer.

Scrum mastery requires being the person who points out when the emperor’s new clothes are illusionary.  The scrum master gets work done and being able to ship product to customers often silences critics inside the organization.  Paradoxically, this kind of success breeds organization resistance because you are upsetting established patterns of work and culture.  It is leadership without authority which drives ineffectual people to resentment.  It is the opposite of the go along to get along personality, which often crops up in corporate organizations. A scrum master by their very nature is an iconoclast.

It explains why a scrum master is often a square peg in a round hole.

Until next time.