The scrum master should feel like an integral part of the team and should celebrate their team's successes and feel badly about things that slow their team down. Not taking on the role of manager, but they do have to manage certain things day to day and make sure the team is meeting their commitments. They should feel more comfortable having difficult discussions when necessary ("your behavior is hurting your team, what ideas do you have to fix that?"). For example, during retrospectives, they should begin to see if certain team members are causing trouble for others, and look at ways to remedy that. They should be able to help get things escalated and resolved so that the team can work more efficiently, and they should start to look at inter-team dynamics.
![entry level scrum master jobs entry level scrum master jobs](https://enhancv.com/static/d853619651d36bfc434c6cfd74acb690/f5ad6/generated-scrum-master-resume.jpg)
![entry level scrum master jobs entry level scrum master jobs](https://eadn-wc03-4064062.nxedge.io/cdn/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Salary_Experience-1-e1633423773621.png)
The scrum master should also act as a roadblock-mover. They should be able to work with the product owner to understand priorities and should then ensure the team's sprint plans agree with those priorities, and help the team communicate to the PO any delays, roadblocks, or unexpected work coming in. They should be able to have basic discussions with the team's business analyst and other stakeholders to help define and break down requirements and document work, and to make sure the requirements and the work intake capacity are in agreement with team goals and previous sprint capacities. ISM's should start helping with work intake. Allow the right conversations to happen naturally, but also steer them away from going off on a tangent.Īt this level, the scrum master needs to get better at understanding the team's work, and explain it or provide updates on things if required. They should understand the basic purpose of each meeting and provide the team some level of direction, as well as steer the meeting without meddling. This would include daily standups, sprint planning, backlog refinement, sprint review, and retrospective meetings. JSM's (if I can shorten it that way) should be able to facilitate and mediate all of the basic Agile ceremonies at a very informal, casual level. They should be able to explain to the more reluctant members of a team why they are doing Agile. Unfortunately this means that senior SMs are often spread too thin between way too many responsibilities.Ī junior scrum master should understand and be able to explain the fundamental principles and founding ideas behind agile. For a larger project, they tend to fill the void left where "self organize" basically fails (anything larger than 40 people or so) and step into a lot of roles traditionally covered by a PM or PMO staff. Senior SMs are often involved in organizing project-wide initiatives, keeping SQA efforts on track (organizationally), making sure that teams are covering needed areas when it comes to release issues, defect prioritization, etc.
![entry level scrum master jobs entry level scrum master jobs](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/hiration/ghost/2021/03/scrum-master-re_53546005.png)
Senior SMs tend to get sucked up into the management functions that are (in my opinion) the weak area of agile scrum. This tends to help the tech leads and BAs a lot. A SM at mid level can not only help facilitate a planning meeting, but has experience with the team and can contribute estimates of what might or might not be too big of an item to take on based on past performance. At this level, the Sm tends to become much more comfortable using their experience to look at past sprints and be able to make projections about future work that make them very useful to PMO types.
![entry level scrum master jobs entry level scrum master jobs](https://www.upgrad.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/screenshot-www.payscale.com-2020.06.03-18_26_39.png)
Mid level SMs are great at generating team cohesion and team morale tends to be high. Mid level SMs are leaders (not in a traditional manager sense, but they are someone the team tends to look to and rely on). Mid level SMs are generally obvious because of their people skills. As with the classic definition of agile scrum, they are always looking out for impediments and seeking to remove them. They provide summaries of team work at internal sprint reviews, and bring up issues the team has to management. They make sure the meetings happen, make sure the right people are there, help the team members self organize, and also track things like story point burndown, etc. In our organization, junior SMs facilitate the cadence of the project.