Scrum Master role

Sometimes people forget how important is the role of Scrum Master.
Is not about only being a servant leader of the Development Team,is also serving the organization and the product owner. Is the link between the team and the rest of the world. Here are some points that a good Scrum Master should take care of.

Definition of done - is one of the most important definitions that should be inspected regularly. It helps to increase the transparency, it helps to improve the quality of work and it helps to keep people aligned. The definition of done should be well understood by each team member, moreover, should be also understood by the stakeholders. This will hugely help to increase the transparency.

Sprint Goal - Scrum Master should take care that after each Sprint planning an objective is set for the Sprint and every team member understand the objective. From my experience, I saw many teams who only choose user stories in a sprint, everybody take care to have the sprint capacity fulfill, but less attention is taken to have a sprint goal agreed and to have the coherence needed to work as a team and not as an individual developer.

Sprint Retrospective - is Scrum Master job to help the team to communicate during the restrospective, to be sure that every single team member give his/her feedback. Is Scrum Master job to help the team to find ways to improve the process, based on their experiences in the sprint.

Resolve conflict - ensure there is communication in the team focusing on values respect and Openess.
Knowing the team you can ensure that the team is fully functional and any potentials conflict can be resolved before is causing any disruptions.

I’ll close this short post with one of my favorite paragraph from Scrum Guide.

“The Scrum Master’s job is to work with the Scrum Team and the organization to increase the transparency of the artifacts. This work usually involves learning, convincing, and change. Transparency doesn’t occur overnight, but is a path.”

In my opinion this should be part of every Scrum Master job description.