7 SCRUMMASTER ANTIPATTERNS

Greetings; In a previous blog post, I touched on Product Owner

Agile Scrum Anti-patterns. This blog post will be dedicated the
common ScrumMaster Antipatterns. Like before, I will point out
problems and suggest small steps take to correct those problems.
Scrum Master instead of project manager
This problem is quite common with persons that are old Project
Managers. Being a Scrum Master is a completely different role
than Project Manager, therefore the way the individual acts must
be completely different.
Typical Project Managers tend to organise the work of people
instead of allowing them self-organisation. They tend to say how,
by whom, and by when the work must be done, not giving much
space for people to think on their own. The result of this usually
teams full of robots instead of people thinking on their own.

Solution
First of all, the Scrum Master must be aware of his behaviour to
be able to correct it. It is not easy; usually these persons worked
for several years in typical Project Manager positions and simply
deleting this behaviour will take some time, but being aware of
it is the first step.
A great Scrum Master is one who allows the team to create the
“How” part. I usually say that the Product Owner mentions
“What” should be done, and the Scrum Master helps the team to
create the “How” part.
Some weeks ago I wrote a blog post about what characteristics
a person should possess to become a great Scrum Master:
“Scrum Master as a Servant Leader“.
Some years ago I read a book that became part of my top most
recommended books to everyone: “Coaching Agile Teams: A
Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project
Managers in Transition.” If you are serious about changing
yourself from typical Project Manager into a fantasticScrum
Master, this book is a must.
Role Mixed with Product Owners
I see this problem in organisations where trust is not present,
where everyone is trying to do everything to look good in front
of management. This is not always the case, but my experience
tells me that it is quite common. This leads to big problems, as
people do not understand what is/should be their role, so
confusion emerges and the productivity of the team goes down.

During my life, I have seen several teams not performing like

they should because the Product Owner and Scrum Master spent
more time discussing roles and responsibilities than helping
teams to produce value for their customers.
Solution
Above I mentioned that typically I see this issue in companies
where trust is not present. I will not define any solution for that
element as workplace culture is something so complex that it
cannot be tackled in such a small blog post.
Instead, I will help those who have this problem because they
are simply confused about their role within the
team/organisation.

Some time ago I wrote a blog post about the tasks and
responsibilities of a Scrum Master; I think that blog post will
provide a lot of ideas about what a Scrum Master is responsible
for; it can be found here.
Lack of Understanding of Focus
Based on my experience, this is one of the most common
problems that Scrum Masters face in their daily activities. Every
day I see teams picking up dozens of features into sprints,
sometimes as many features as team members. The same
problem is seen during scrum dailies where I see developers
picking up their stories, not caring much about work in progress.
As a result, the team ends up having as many stories on going
as total developers. Of course, this is quite a critical issue,
because teams that work like that are not focused, and as a
result, they will take longer to deliver anything.
Solution
I have been coaching Scrum Masters for quite a long time on this
topic. The solution here is to demonstrate to the Scrum
Master and the team how important it is to work on one single
topic at a time. There are several games that explain to people
how context switching creates delays; I think this is a good place
to start, to begin by explaining and making people understand
what the problem is with this approach.
After that, Scrum Masters must help the teams in their daily
activities. This can be achieved by paying constant attention to
the number of features that are taken into the iteration and to
the total amount of stories that are ongoing.
Ideally, a single team works with one single feature during an
iteration and with one single story during the day. Of course, this
is not always possible, but this is the ideal situation. The Scrum
Master should facilitate this process by asking the team if they
can or cannot take just one single feature into the iteration.
The same should happen every day in the daily when a member
of the development team wants to start a new story; he should
ask if all the tasks from other previous stories are closed. If they
are not, he should pick whatever tasks are still open to close the
story as soon as possible. I believe this will increase velocity and
focus of the team
SCRUM MASTERS DO NOT COACH THE
ORGANIZATION
This antipattern is quite common in companies that make the
agile transition but do not understand the role of Scrum Masters.
They believe the Scrum Master´s job is to take care of teams and
nothing else. Unfortunately, this is completely wrong.
Their role is much more complicated than we can think of! One
of their significant responsibilities is to coach the whole
organisation in their agile transition. Some time ago, I wrote a
blog post, which describes a Scrum Master job description. This
post creates a better understanding of Scrum Master´s
responsibilities.
Solution
Companies that want to succeed with Agile should understand
the crucial role that Scrum Masters play in their Agile transition. I
want you to be aware – good Scrum Masters are scarce in our
society!
In my opinion, a good Scrum Master should be able to answer to
most of the “32 Scrum Master interview questions“ in a positive way.
As you can see, there are lots of things that a Scrum
Master should do, however, it is quite common that companies
do not have these kinds of people within their organisations,
unfortunately.
A solution? A good possibility to solve this problem is to bring
external coaches for some months to teach Scrum Masters to
become a great team and organisational coaches. I know this is
not the cheapest option, but in the long term, this is something
that will save millions to any company.
SCRUM MASTER IS JUST A SECRETARY
Many people think this way… In such situation, I get extremely
worried, because it means that people do not know what a Scrum
Master should do.
In the previous case, I explained how companies do not
understand how the Scrum Master is important to all
organisation; even though this is not acceptable, but at least it´s
understandable.
Nonetheless, when people think the Scrum Master is just the guy
booking meetings, facilitating dailies and serving the coffee to
their colleagues, this is when things get very dark, and
unfortunately, this is very common. I´ve met several Scrum
Masters that described these tasks as their daily duties…
Solution
Some time ago, I wrote a blog post that describes “The Scrum
Master as Servant Leader“. This is exactly what a Scrum
Master should do.
The Scrum Master has dozens of different roles and hats, but this
is far way from the Secretary job that most of the companies
associate Scrum Masters with. Teach, recruit and coach people to
be what I mention on my blog and you will grow Scrum
Masters into true leaders.
SCRUM MASTER DOES NOT COACH
THE PRODUCT OWNER
Throughout my career, I´ve seen this happening quite often; it´s
super normal to see the Scrum Master focusing on “team tasks”
and forgetting the business part.

When I say he forgets the business part, I do not mean that he

should do the PO´s job, but he should help the PO to build a
product that brings the maximum value to the company. The
Scrum Master should coach him with product backlog topics and
help him to understand how can a team bring the maximum
amount of value with the minimum effort.

Solution
One thing that I saw working very well during my career was
when the Scrum Master invested some good time in studying
about Product Management to understand the PO role much
better. For example, it could be a good idea to have the Scrum
Master taking the Product Ownertraining course or read a couple
of Product Management books. See some of the ones that I
recommend below:
 The Lean Startup
 Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love
 Agile Product Management with Scrum
 The Principles of Product Development Flow
 Fifty Quick Ideas To Improve Your User Stories
 Impact Mapping

The Scrum Masters that I coached and who follow this advice
became very powerful Scrum Masters. They were able to help a
team to grow and at the same time help the Product Owner find
the most value out of the team.
SCRUM MASTER IS NOT RECOGNISED
BY MANAGEMENT
In this case, I define management as middle management. I saw
too many times that middle managers think they are the ones
able to change the organisation, and Scrum Masters are only
secretaries.
Middle managers are very important to any agile implementation.
They are the ones that can help a company to succeed
tremendously and create fantastic Agile and lean companies. On
the other hand, they are the ones that can destroy any attempt
to change anything. Unfortunately, in my experience, the latter
one is the most common.
Solution
Like I explained before, Scrum Masters are very important to the
organisation, and their importance should be recognised. In the
end, they play a big role in teams´ growth, agile implementation
in all organisation and Product Owners coaching, allowing them to
produce products that customers love. In the first place,
managers need to understand “What is an Agile Manager“, they
need to understand that this job is different than in traditional
companies.
The next step is to understand that nothing can be achieved
alone. Managers need to understand that Scrum Masters are their
partners of success and their life is much easier if they support
them since the beginning. They need to understand and be
aware of “The different levels of Agile Coaching“.
At last, I would suggest that senior management should hire
external coaches. In this case, professional coaching will not only
help the Scrum Masters but also middle managers who are then
able to see how important they are and how much they need to
empower the Scrum Masters to succeed in their role.
CHANGE SCRUM MASTER ROLE
OFTEN
Changing the Scrum Master role within the team is something
that I sometimes hear, fortunately not that often. The defenders
of this theory claim this is beneficial for the team and different
team members. The assumption here is that if people change the
role of Scrum Master, the whole team can understand what are
the difficulties and challenges of a Scrum Master and therefore
be more understandable with colleagues.
Some people argue these ideas are possible because the role of
Scrum Master is to make him disposable. Therefore, if teams do
not need him, they can change the place. In my opinion, this
argument is strange! Of course scrum master´s role is to make
him disposable, but to reach that level, the team must be quite
mature. And if the team reaches that level, Scrum Master is not
necessary at all. Thus, there is no need for rotation as there is
no need for the Scrum Master.

The big problem with this idea relies on the fact that every time
a person within team changes, the interaction between people
change. People that are aware of the four phases of a team: The
Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing, know that these
phases are all necessary and inevitable for the team to grow, to
face challenges, to tackle problems, to find a solution, to plan
work and to deliver work. Every time a person within the team
changes, the team goes back to the beginning of these four
phases, forcing some reset to the team.

Solution
The basic idea behind all these suggestions relies on the fact that
people feel the need to share knowledge, however, changing the
Scrum Master role often is by far not the best option.
I truly believe that knowledge sharing is something important, I
think if “you do not create a knowledge sharing culture you will die“.
So to share knowledge, you have several ways I present here.

he scrum master holds a unique position as their role is to facilitate the team
in coordinating itself, and resolving any problems as and when they arise. Like
all Agile based frameworks, Scrum too supports the "inspect" and "adapt"
principles. Scrum teams are self-organising and self-managing.
The teams govern themselves and streamline the development work.
However, at times, the development team may face a problem, and might be
unable to find a proper solution to deal with the problem. That is when
the scrum master steps in - the person studies the problem, determines the
best possible way of dealing with the issue, and suggests ideas to the team
how to resolve the problem.

Ideally, the scrum master should employ a servant-leader role and foster a
healthy working environment by maintaining a personal contact with team
members. The person acts as a mentor, listens to the issues faced by the
team members, and helps to resolve their issues.

“Scrum suggests a facilitator's role for the scrum master, and advises that a
scrum master should not transgress his or her role”

Transgress here means not to go beyond certain limits. This is important since
the development team is autonomous in its working and undertakes its own
decisions. As it so happens, if a scrum master has a technical background, he
or she may get involved with the work carried out by the team and start
suggesting ideas. This could make it difficult for the team to function since
Scrum teams decide for themselves how a product feature should be
developed.

The individual taking on the responsibilities of a scrum master should make it

a point not to commit three common mistakes that individuals new to the
scrum master's role usually make.

1. Let the team be self-organized, don’t coordinate

the team.
The scrum master generally remains closer to the development team as
he/she looks after majority of the issues whether technical or non-technical
one.

Owing to the frequent and daily interactions with the team, a scrum master
may start feeling inclined to be a "part" of the development team, rather than
as a separate Scrum entity having a specific role to play.
In the course of action of daily activities, a scrum master may unconsciously
start coordinating the activities of the team. This may not be intentional, but
simply out of rote. Scrum authorizes the development team to self-organise
and self-manage. The team can make informed decisions on its own, and it
is not required for the scrum master to intervene or try to coordinate the team
activity.

Scrum teams are self-governing. In scrum, teams learn from their mistakes
through the "inspect" and "adapt" principles supported by events such as
reviews and sprint retrospectives. Teams can learn when they coordinate
themselves. A scrum master should not intervene and try to coordinate any
activity other than his or her own.

2. Let the team decide, don’t take decisions on

behalf of the team.
The work done by a development team can be often very demanding and
complex. Many times, teams face situations where it becomes difficult to
decide upon the correct course of action, or what kind of decisions it should
make to solve the problem. It is important for the team to develop individual
thinking, make informed decisions based upon their levels of experience, and
hold themselves responsible for the decisions they undertake.

A scrum master closely monitors the activities carried out by individual team
members. He/she tries to ensure that the team follows scrum properly.

Individuals often get influenced by the type of environment they are working
in, and in case of scrum masters, they might be tempted to have their say
regarding what the team should ideally do to resolve a particular issue. There
is nothing wrong with that. However, scrum masters should realise that
offering suggestions to resolve an issue is quite different than actually
deciding on behalf of the entire team.

"Scrum promotes team work, and emphasises upon team work over individual
efforts".
The scrum master should not make decisions on behalf of the team - S/he
should rather suggest a correct course of action and facilitate the team to
make their own decisions.

3. Unanimously resolving technical issues.

Scrum offers an organised way of working. To complete the scrum process,
each member in the team takes on tasks specific to his or her profile. An
important rule to follow is not to transgress one's particular area of work.

Each team member is responsible for himself or herself and is advised to work
within the scope specified by the role he or she plays in Scrum. The role of a
scrum master is to facilitate scrum proceedings. But many times scrum
masters take the initiative and start resolving issues on their own after
studying a problem. This should not happen in Scrum. Suppose a product
owner faces a particular issue, he or she can consult the scrum master
regarding what should be done, but the final decision should be taken by the
product owner, and not by the scrum master.
"Scrum supports this particular approach because self-correction and self-
learning processes cannot exist otherwise".

If any of the team members start taking decisions and resolving issues on
their own, it would not be team work. It is important for the entire team to learn
from the decisions it makes, rather than individual team members.
SCRUMMASTER AS A SERVANT LEADER
In the SCRUM world, a ScrumMaster is often known as a Servant
Leader, but I believe that very few people know what a Servant
Leader is.
Based on this assumption, I am writing this blog post to explain
what a Servant Leader is and what the characteristics of a good
servant leader are (in this case, a Scrum Master). I will start by
using the Greenleaf definition of what a servant leader is:
The servant leader is a servant first. It begins with the natural feeling
that one wants to serve. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to
lead. The best test is: do those served to grow as persons: do they,
while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous,
more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on
the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or, at least, not be
further deprived? (Greenleaf, 1977/2002, p. 27)
Larry Spears in his article: “Character and Servant Leadership:
Ten Characteristics of Effective, Caring Leaders” explains
that servant leadership seeks to involve others in decision making, is
strongly based in ethical and caring behaviour and enhances the
growth of workers while improving the caring and quality of
organisational life.
In the same article, Larry Spears explains that a good servant
leader has ten characteristics that are of critical importance:
Listening

The servant leader must be willing to listen and identify the will
of a group. Hearing it will give him the opportunity to clarify that
will. The leader must be able to listen and reflect on what is being
said; this is an important aspect of being a servant leader.
Empathy
Empathy is quite an important characteristic for a servant leader
to have. A servant leader must accept and recognise the special
and unique spirits that exist for each different person. They
cannot reject coworkers and colleagues as people, even in
difficult conflict situations. A successful servant leader is a great
empathetic listener.
Healing

This can be considered one of the strengths of a servant leader:

The power of healing one´s self and one´s relationship to others.
Servant leaders understand that they can take on a unique role
within their team/group. They have a unique power to fix
relationships.
Awareness

Knowledge helps people to become stronger. Awareness helps

the servant leader to understand issues involving ethics, power,
and values. This characteristic helps any servant leader to be able
to view situations from a more holistic and integrated position.
Persuasion

A good servant leader tries to convince others, instead of forcing

compliance. Usually, a successful servant leader is great at
building consensus within teams.
Conceptualisation

Transforming a big vision into small workable pieces that

everyone understands is a great characteristic servant leader
generally have. They have the ability to pick up on daily problems
and conceptualise solutions that are recognized by everyone.
Foresight
A great servant leader can foresee the likely outcome of even the
most difficult situation. Using previous experience and present
data, they can predict with high accuracy the future result of a
case.
Stewardship

Servant leadership involves an inherent commitment to serve the

needs of others. It also emphasises the use of openness and
persuasion, rather than control.
Commitment to the Growth of People

Servant leaders believe in real intrinsic motivation. They believe

that all individuals have a lot to contribute to the organisation. A
great servant leader is committed to helping people to grow
within the organisation.
Building Community

Building a community among those who work within a given

group is the last characteristic of a great servant leader. They
believe they can create authentic communities among the people
that work within the same organisation(s).