Answers to Divya: Whom does a Scrum Master report to and frequency?
In the Scrum foundation training, we know that Scrum master’s relationships are like this:
- Scrum Master works with Product Owner to ensure that (s)he fulfils her/his job. Scrum master coaches the Product Owner and gives him his support against external aggressions.
It means that if the PO is your supervisor you want be able to coach him/her. Consequence, you don’t have to report to PO but because in agile, work is made highly visible, you can comment to PO like any other team member.
- The Scrum master works with the Development team to ensure that everyone does what it had committed to do.
Development team, like PO are part of the Scrum team, so the rules explained previously are applied here too.
- The Scrum master protects the team and eliminate barriers.
Protection and barriers elimination are Impediments. I recommend to create an Impediment Backlog highlighting the hints towards perfect workflow. That backlog is highlighted in front of all the stakeholders while starting the Sprint Review. It expresses the context of development and make it fully transparent for better decision making. Example: my team has a fixed capacity of 200 hours for a 2 week/sprint. The team delivers 20 story points but they had only 20% development time, 80% of impediments came from unplanned meetings (not scrum meetings), work outside the project, infrastructure issues, dependencies, and so on. That reports the reality of context and is asking for action of the management. In large transformations, scrum masters, agile coaches and management are gathering once a week in an Impediment Bashing meeting for collective problem solving and escalation of impediments into risks under management umbrella.
- The product owner works continuously with the customer to adapt the product backlog according to the changes proposed by the customer relating to the product vision.
Scrum master is ensuring that communication works at its best.
- Development team works with the End User to understand the needs and develops the solution according to their aims.
Scrum master ensures that the Development team knows the End Users, Customers at least meeting them at the Sprint Review.
- Usually their meet the best at Sprint Review
- Scrum master and manager work together to review guidelines and processes. They ensure that the development team can have what it needs to ensure development.
Management is the principal supervisor of Scrum Masters regarding two main points: people management and organization development to ensure that everyone has the tools and environment to reach the expected goal. In large companies, “management” is too wage and involves Transformation Management, COO, HR, Chapter Leads, PMO.
- The Product Owner must know the needs of the end user in order to ensure delivery of a used product.
- These requirements are usually written as User Stories.
Now, if you are working in big companies with many teams, the Scrum Master is usually working in an Agile Transformation Office (or whatever name). That team is an agile team working on the Agile Transformation Backlog with other Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Agile Tech Coaches, Enterprise Agile Coaches.
Here the Scrum Master is reporting to the Agile Transformation Team on Impediments and emerging innovation. The outcome of this individual report is the Monthly Transformation Report showing the actions of change.
