Why Most Scrum Masters Are Failing and What They Should Know

I’ve worked with hundreds of companies to help them get better at building software products, and it beggars belief that so many Scrum Masters have no idea about Scrum, let alone the domain of the team they are trying to help.

Most Scrum Masters (about 61%*) have not read the Scrum Guide, have no technical acumen within the context of the Scrum team they work with, or have only a basic or rudimentary ability to apply Scrum!

_ And they wonder why they are getting laid off. _

I’m not surprised that they are, and I would go so far as to say that most Scrum Masters are incompetent and should be fired. Unfortunately, many of the 39% of competent Scrum Masters are getting caught up in the cull.

What should a Scrum Master for a software team know?

The core accountability of a Scrum Master is the effectiveness of the Scrum Team! Can you help them be effective if you don’t understand even the most basic practices within that team’s context?

“A Scrum Master is a lean agile practitioner with techical mastery, business mastery, and organsiational evolutionary mastery!” – Lyssa Adkins**

I would expect a Scrum Master for a software team to know:

• Scrum : its values, underlying principles, and how to apply them effectively. This includes understanding the Scrum framework (roles, events, artefacts) and the purpose behind each element.
• DevOps : understand the three ways of DevOps, common practices, and how to apply them effectively. This means knowing automation, infrastructure as code (IaC), and continuous feedback loops.
• Modern Engineering practices : everything from DevOps, plus… CI/CD, SOLID principles, test-first strategies, progressive rollout strategies, feature flags, 1ES (One Engineering System), observability of product. Familiarity with design patterns, refactoring, and coding standards.
• Agile/lean beyond Scrum : a strong understanding of other Agile/lean philosophies like Kanban, XP (Extreme Programming), and TPS. Know when and how to integrate elements from other frameworks and strategies to complement Scrum.
• Release Planning : understanding what release planning entails, how to break down product roadmaps, and how to forecast releases while balancing priorities. Be able to facilitate discussions with the Product Owner and Developers about product increment goals.
• Product Discovery & Validation : understanding what needs to be built and how to make decisions based on limited knowlage. Know and understand evidence-based management and hypothesis-driven engineering practices.
• Stakeholder Management : understanding how to work with stakeholders, communicate progress, manage expectations, and foster alignment. Know how to teach the team to shield themselves from external pressure while still delivering value.
• Scaling Agile : Understand frameworks for scaling Agile, such as Descaling, LeSS, or Nexus. Be able to coach teams on how to function effectively within a scaled environment and manage dependencies.
• Coaching and Facilitation Skills : the ability to coach the team towards self-management, continuous improvement, and collaboration. Skilled in facilitation techniques like liberating structires to be able to facilitate meetings and events.
• Conflict Management : possess the ability to navigate the grone zone safely leverage managed conflicts within the team and foster a healthy team environment for ideation and discovery. Understand team dynamics and how to encourage constructive feedback and communication.
• Metrics and Continuous Improvement : familiarity with Agile metrics (e.g., Cycle Time, Work Item Aging, Work In Process, Throughput), and how to use them to enable improvement. Ability to encourage the team to reflect on these metrics and find ways to improve.

While the Scrum Master may not _ do _ much of this work above, they are _ accountable _ for it being done effectively! That means training and mentoring teams in the use of the practices above, and then once they understand, knowing when to move towards coaching and facilitation of the team, their stakeholders, and the organisation.

“Without theory, there is no learning. That is, without theory, there is no way to use the information that comes to us. We need a theory for data. We need a theory for experience. Without theory, we learn nothing.” – W. Edwards Deming***

Reference

• * Assessment of knowledge based on Scrum Match model and their published data
• ** Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition by Lyssa Adkins
• *** System of Profound Knowledge by W. Edwards Deming

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