Do I have to be a Scrum Master to manage the agile scrums?

Question

I am sure to become a scrum master could really add value to the process I am following, however I believe that the background of the area of the application I am working on help more to get better planning and scheduling done for the project

Answer 1

Becoming a CSM doesn't really qualify you for running a Scrum project either. Practice is the only preparation you can ever hope for.

The CSM class/cert is valuable still, though. At the very least, if you don't have a mentor/coach to lean on, you should read..

• Agile Project Management with Scrum (Schwaber)
• Agile Estimation and Planning (Cohn)
• User Stories Applied (Cohn)

and take the CSM course. You'll be moderately prepared to run a Scrum project.

The biggest thing you can take away from this is: you'll make mistakes if you're new to this. If you can learn some pitfalls and see what to avoid, then you can avoid the cost of making/learning from these mistakes.

Answer 2

You probably would benefit from becomming a certified scrum master (i recently became one myself).

The scrum master shouldn't 'manage the scrums' but instead be there to facilitate the team - help it remove impediments. The team is self organizing and pretty much manages itself.

Answer 3

If you need the official certification to feel good or to show to your management - go for it. However, you don't have to have the certification in order to apply the Scrum process in your team.

(In fact, requiring a certification to be able to run an agile process would be very anti-agile to me :-))

Of course, taking a course to understand better what are the Agile principles and how to use Scrum to apply them to your daily work is always good.

Answer 4

Required:       No.
Recomended: Yes.

But nothing beats experience.
Also note that every team project is unique and thus following a set of rules set out in an agile book may be a good point to start but you will need to adapt the processes to your scrum. Rember the whole point is to let ytour team do their work without adding unneeded processes (note some processes is required).

In my experience management still want metrics that SCRUM does not provide. Personally I humor them for the first couple of months but try and drop them as the scrum processes starts to show that we are making our targets and these metrics become more and more out of line.

Answer 5

I just have an issue with the wording used here - in the question and responses. As a scrum master you would not be managing the project, or running it. The team runs the project in a self-directed way. The scrum master's role is to facilitate and coach.

This may seem like semantics, but I often find that our chosen terms shed light on our underlying tendencies - in this case they may indicate a tendency towards command and control vs. facilitating self-directed teams.

I do agree that reading on agile (not just scrum) is helpful. And having been a member of an agile team is incredibly useful in serving as a scrum master. CSM is like the PMP for classic project management (without the test) for agile - not an indicator of ability, but useful for finding jobs with acronym-myopic recruiters and hiring managers.

There are good consultants out there to help, and useful resources online (see the scrumdevelopment group on Yahoo). I suggest you use both liberally.

Answer 6

Do not understand scrum master as some kind of manager role!

This is big mistake, but many companies understand it that way. Anyone can be Scrum master.

Sometimes every sprint can have different scrum master. BTW, this is very interesting, because everyone will realize what does it means to be scrum master.

Answer 7

The discussion about the Scrum Master role starts with the word Master. From my point of view we need to understand the difference between Scrum implementation/transition and taking care of Scrum in an environment where Scrum is already running.

1. Everybody can become a Scrum Master by attending a course. The certification is NOT an indication of experience or know how regarding agile processes.
2. A good Scrum Master will take care of the Scrum Flow in an Scrum Environment. He will coach the team and takes care that the team can work undisturbed. But this does not mean, that he can train and teach the team the PO and everybody else how to do Scrum...
3. To implement Scrum in an organisation or team it needs experiences on overall processes and strategic thinking.

If you have a look at the Scrum Alliance Website you will find the descriptions of the certifications, and what one have to know and prove before getting the certification.

There is much to learn for a "Certified Scrum Master" before he will be a Certified Scrum Coach

If Scrum fails not because of Scrum, but because people THINK they do Scrum ;-)

Doro

Answer 8

Hi all, this is an interesting topic, and to some extent extremely undefined... the word "manage" is entailing potentially a whole world of things.

Everybody can "try" to do Scrum, the theory it is not difficult to grasp, what is hard is the practice. Scrum like other agile approaches is very much based on "People and Interactions" and in order to make them happen right, you will have to deeply understand the values, the relationships and the ownerships that the whole Scrum framework describe. That is the hard part, and is a part that requires a lot of practice, and experience to be effectively converted into daily practice.

This of course doesn't mean that you can "learn" yourself, on the contrary, often we hear that Scrum is "learning by doing... and failing" and so "fail often... and fail fast!". All Lean thinking principles, but it is much less trivial than it seems to get the point where it is time to assess results, identify failure, and set best practices for improvement. Being a Scrum Master means that one knows the framework and the relationship between the three main roles, which is way far from saying that he can implement Scrum. That step is in the Scrum Alliance signed buy the CSP (Certified Scrum Practitioner) accreditation, that requires a minimum of one year of practicing Scrum, to be allowed to submit the accreditation form. This is intentionally done because only with practice people will learn what the principle "that in theory are sounding clear" - and you will learn at a CSM Training - really mean, and moreover how to use them to maximize the productivity and efficiency of a Scrum Team.

When we talk about an organization, and we want to implement Scrum, the dimensions to consider, as well as the complexity, are some order of magnitude bigger, and way out of reach of a "simple" - no offence, we talk about mapping value streams, structures, accounting... - Scrum Master. To do something like that, either you take a lot of risk yourself, and you can afford to heavily affect the productivity of your company, or you need someone who has experience in helping companies to transact to agile and Scrum. This is what the CSC (Certified Scrum Coach) accreditation is all about.

Hope this helps a bit :-)