Roles and Responsibilities: Scrum Master/Team Coach
This blog will help you understand the roles and responsibilities of Scrum Master also known as a Team Coach. But before we deep dive into the roles and responsibilities, it would be great to have a quick overview of who is known to be a Scrum Master or a Team Coach in SAFe.
Who is a Scrum Master?
The SAFe Scrum Master/Team Coach (SM/TC) is a servant leader and coach for an Agile team who facilitates team events and processes and supports teams and ARTs in delivering value. They help educate the team in Scrum, Built-in-Quality, Kanban, and SAFe and ensure that the agreed Agile processes are followed. They also help remove impediments and foster an environment for high-performing team dynamics, continuous flow, and relentless improvement.
In SAFe, the Scrum Master/Team Coach (SM/TC) assists the team in meeting their delivery goals. They coach teams in self-organization and self-management and help them coordinate and participate in Agile Release Trains (ARTs) events, increasing the effectiveness of SAFe across the organization.
Roles and Responsibilities of Scrum Master
The SM/TC fulfills many critical responsibilities in performing the role, as illustrated in the below given figure. Each of these responsibilities is described in the sections that follow.
First Responsibility: Facilitating PI Planning
The first responsibility can be further explained with the following sub-set responsibilities.
1. Prepare for PI Planning
Pre-planning event ensures that PM, business owners and stakeholders have briefed team about upcoming features. The purpose is to help team and PO identify local stories maintenance, defects, tech debt, and other work the team needs to accomplish during the upcoming PI.
2. Draft PI Plans
SM/TCs facilitates the team in creating draft plans for upcoming iterations in PI and helps the team set up their digital or physical planning areas, providing visual radiators that create transparency and collaboration. They help the team determine their capacity and keep within this constraint.
3. Coordinate with other teams
SM/TCs are the ones who are helping the cross-team collaboration throughout the event for the purpose of
collaboration on feature development and managing dependencies. They also help secure SMEs and ART stakeholders for their inputs wherever needed.
4. Create team PI objectives
SM/TCs help teams create team PI objectives, the things they intend to accomplish in the upcoming PI. They ensure the objectives are written before the draft plan review and that a proper mix of committed and uncommitted goals is present.
5. Review final plans and business value
Before the final review, SM/TCs help ensure PI objectives are Smart (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound) and are written in a way everyone can understand.
Second Responsibility: Supporting Iteration Execution
1. Facilitate Team Events
One of the primary responsibilities of the SM/TCs is to facilitate team events.
2. Work within the ARTs cadence
SMs help teams apply Scrum or KANBAN within the development cadence and synchronization. This helps
dependency management, helps the team release on demand and fast integrated learning cycles which reflects the 4th SAFe principle.
3. Collaborate with the PO
Since the Product Owner (PO) is accountable for maximizing the solution’s value resulting from the team’s work, an essential aspect of the SM/TC’s role is supporting the PO. They do this by
- capacity building on tools and techniques for customer centricity and design thinking
- helping teams to align on creating clear backlog items along with alignment on capacity allocation at the ART level
- helping teams with emperical planning where progress is based on observation and experimentation
- facilitating stakeholders meeting
Third Responsibility: Improving Flow
1. Establish the team KANBAN board
SAFe teams use a Kanban board to visualize their work and enhance flow. Creating the Kanban system is best done by involving the entire Agile Team with the guidance and facilitation of an experienced coach like the SM/TCs.
2. Measure and optimize flow
SM/TCs help the team establish metrics to assess and improve its overall performance. The 3 measurement domains are:
- Outcomes
- Flow
- Dependency
3. Built quality in
SM/TCs helps the team in releasing high quality business capabilities in shortest period of time by coaching Built-in quality practices.
Fourth Responsibility: Building high performing teams
1. Foster and support agile team attributes
Various common attributes of a high performing team are
- ownership and accountability
- focus on clear goals and purpose
- providing effective and timely feedback
SM/TCs are responsible for supporting and fostering the same.
2. Encourage high performing team dynamics
SM/TCs mentors the team and creates an atmosphere of mutual respect, helping resolve interpersonal conflicts, and identifying growth opportunities that set the right atmosphere for a team to be a high performing team
3. Become a more effective SM/Team coach
Every servant leader knows that their growth comes from facilitating the development of others who deliver the results.The SM/TC supports the overall adoption of SAFe across the enterprise by
- coaching stakeholders and non-agile teams
- participating in SM/TC community of practice
- supporting SAFe practice consultants
4. Serve as Lean-Agile leaders
SM/TCs intergrate the concepts of Lean-Agile mindset and SAFe Lean-Agile principles into their responsibilities and become a role model for others to follow.
5. Foster collaboration on the team
SM/TCs offer observations, feedback, guidance, and advice based on what they know and have seen.
This helps team operate in a cohesive manner enabling better business outcomes.
6. Coach with powerful questions
As coaches, SM/TCs are not expected to have all the answers. Instead, they should ask powerful questions to uncover what’s essential and then use their knowledge to guide the team.
7. Resolve team conflicts
SM/TCs help address 5 dysfunctions in the team as stated by Patrick Lencioni i.e.
- absence of trust
- fear of conflict
- lack of commitment
- avoidance of accountability
- inattention to results
These questions help address most of the team conflicts at the team level.
8. Develop team skillsets
SM/TCs work with team members and their functional managers to help them acquire T-shaped skills. A T-shaped individual has broad, general expertise in many areas and is an expert in one of these disciplines.
Fifth Responsibility: Improving ART Performance
1. Facilitate cross team collaboration
SAFe SM/TCs nurture an environment where cross-team collaboration thrives and is supported by practices that offer opportunities for teams to work together. It could be done in various ways such as
- representing the team in coach sync/ART sync
- participating in other team events with relevant team members
- address dependencies during PI planning
- participating in ART events such as System demos and I & A event
2. Build trust with stakeholders
SM/TCs help in planning and aligning the stakeholders to keep commitments close to realistic, thus supporting the process of building trust with time.
3. Coach the IP iteration
SM/TCs should ensure that the teams do not plan any work for IP iteration. However, amongst the other tasks such as I&A, PI planning and other coaching exercises, they do keep some buffer for meeting PI objectives if needed.
4. Help the team inspect & adapt
SMs help the team prepare for 3 I&A events
- PI System demo
- Qualtitative and Qualitative measurement
- Retrospective and Problem solving workshop
They also ensure that the teams are able to work within timeboxes.
5. Facilitate the problem-solving workshop
SM/TCs coach teams in root cause analysis, the ‘five why’s,’ and Pareto analysis. They ensure that the relevant work needed to deliver the identified improvements is planned and added to the Team Backlog.
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