What's good this week awesome people? I hope you are starting your week with excitement. As you already know, in Scrum Guide 2020, the Scrum Master is now an accountability. As a Scrum Master myself, I am excited to see the accountability of the Scrum Master clearly defined so that the company who hires me has a clear expectation about what I will do at their company.
The change is needed because the Scrum Master has been misperceived as an entry level role that only operates within the team level by too many people in our industry. By the way, how many times have you seen people at your company misperceive the Scrum Master? The top three misperceptions about the Scrum Master that I have seen so far are:
- The Scrum Master is the developer's personal secretary.
- The Scrum Master is the master of ceremony (MC).
- Or the Scrum Master is the event organiser (EO) for the Scrum events.
Not only the Scrum Master is misunderstood, Scrum itself has been misunderstood by people in our industry. Several examples of common misunderstandings about Scrum I keep hearing so far:
- Scrum is just an iterative mini-waterfall or iterative mini-deadline;
- The Product Owner is just the glorified requirements engineer;
- Developers are only the technical people who write the software codes;
And of course there are many other misperceptions going around the company that the Scrum Master needs to straighten out besides these three I just mentioned above.
As written in Scrum Guide, one of the accountabilities of the Scrum Master is helping people understand Scrum. So if people in the company still don't get Scrum ...
But on the other side of the coin, what if everyone in the company finally understands Scrum? Like .. really get Scrum. Does this mean the Scrum Master's existence in the company is only temporary like Nanny McPhee as some people in the industry commonly understood?
I kept on failing with making people understand what the Scrum Master does actually through texts or blog posts. If the Scrum Master keeps on failing using one approach, that means he/she needs to find a different approach (I am talking to myself that is..). As Scrum Masters are accountable to help people understand Scrum, I created this video which will hopefully help more people understand what the Scrum Master actually does. I personally will use this video myself.
If you are a Scrum Master that has been misunderstood by people at your company, can you please help me share this video at your company and let me know whether people understand about what you actually do as a Scrum Master after they watch this video? As I mentioned on my previous video, one of the outcomes that I want to achieve through the videos on my youtube channel is improved understanding about Scrum from my channel viewers. If you get a funny stare from your colleagues after they watch this video below, please let me know by leaving a comment so that I can create an add-on video that compliment this one. The more feedback I get, the better.
Thanks folks. I really appreciate it. Have an awesome week. Let's do this.