Becoming a successful scrum master is not about gaining knowledge of scrum practices; it is about being able to facilitate all kinds of audiences, deal with chaos, and help teams grow. The learning of the scrum master is a never-ending journey. The scrum master should perform best at their job role, tackle everything simultaneously and look at the ways to become a high-impact scrum facilitator.
What is Facilitation?
Facilitation is a meeting, training or workshop conducted by the scrum masters to help the teams achieve desired results. The scrum master does not get deeply involved in the process, but they provide structure to keep the process flowing while keeping the teams aligned to organisational goals. The scrum master holding SAFe Scrum Master certification can help the teams deliver expected outcomes within an agreed time frame.
Understanding Your role
Facilitation is about helping the teams grow. The scrum master can become a good facilitator when he allows the conversation to keep moving without adding his own perspectives. The master should be involved in active listening with the intent to understand the concern rather than the intent to reply to the question. They should allow the participants to voice their opinions in the meeting. Questioning the participants on behalf of others who cannot frame it clearly makes the scrum master a high-impact facilitator. A good facilitator should make an effort to remove ambiguity and encourage clarity in the meeting.
Identify Challenges
The scrum master should identify challenges that affect the team’s performance. Though the job of the scrum master does not fix every challenge, they need to create an environment to conduct meaningful conversations and create a shared understanding of the challenges to create collective ownership.
Psychological safety during sprints
The scrum master should facilitate sprints and retrospectives and allow teams to speak openly about the impediments in project progress. By creating a safe environment for the teams to discuss the problems, the scrum master can find the issues early that lead to faster solutions.
Feedback from stakeholders
A scrum master can become a high-impact facilitator by having structured feedback sessions with the stakeholders. This helps them to aim to reduce conflicts and develop a shared responsibility between teams and stakeholders.
Workflow inefficiencies
The scrum master should facilitate value stream mapping to identify bottlenecks. Rather than playing a blame game, the scrum facilitator should guide the teams to observe the pattern and allow them to get a shared insight into workflow inefficiencies to identify improvements collectively.
Root cause analysis
The facilitator should conduct root cause analysis sessions to help the teams focus on learning by turning insights into improvement experiments. As the teams gain a deeper understanding of the root cause and adopt continuous learning, they can develop high-quality outcomes.
Manage dependencies.
The scrum master should facilitate dependency mapping sessions to help the team know both internal and external dependencies and foster better collaboration between the teams. By managing the dependencies, the teams can improve planning and predict delivery timelines.
Skill assessment
The scrum master should conduct skill assessment sessions to support self-growth and self-organising teams that can work with greater confidence and capability.
Prioritisation
After identifying challenges, the scrum master should prioritise the issues based on their impact on the team’s effectiveness and give importance to the ones that have a greater influence on the team’s performance.
Business value delivery
They should prioritise handling the challenges that impact delivering customer value first. Anything that impacts business value should be handled first, irrespective of its complexity.
Incremental delivery
The second most important priority should be given to handling the issues that impact incremental value delivery, as consistent failure would affect fundamental value delivery.
Learning and adoption
Learning and adoption are constant processes in agile business environments. Any bottlenecks in the process of learning will affect transparency, review and adoption. The scrum master should focus on establishing clear goals, address poor feedback loops and resistance to change to keep the adoption in the organisation successful.
Self-management teams
The scrum master should address the challenges that prevent the teams from becoming self-managed, such as waiting for decision approvals from external sources, centralised decision-making and limiting autonomy in project planning and execution. The scrum masters also handle the issues that affect team collaboration to maximise the full potential of the team’s technical expertise. While making the teams self-resilient, the scrum masters should allow experimentation to enable teams to learn and adapt.
With the effective prioritisation of the scrum master, the teams will gain clarity and focus on their work. The efforts will be aligned with Scrum values and business outcomes.
Facilitate Conflict
When the projects are driven by cross-functional teams, the scrum masters should be able to identify conflicts early and neutralise diverse viewpoints to keep the focus on the ideas rather than people. The scrum master should facilitate structured debate to expose cross-team dependencies and the hidden bottlenecks. By handling disagreements well, the scrum master can build psychological safety for the team and allow diverse thinking to gain multiple perspectives.
Facilitate as per team maturity
The scrum master needs to tailor facilitation as per the team’s maturity. Not every team will need the same approach to create an impact. Teams at the entry level need the scrum master to frame a clear agenda to get the desired outcomes. They also need proper guidance and a working process to deliver desired outcomes within the stated timeframes. The scrum master should tailor facilitation based on the team’s maturity and the complexity of the task
Conclusion
A scrum master can create high impact when the facilitation moves beyond conducting the standup meetings. They should be active listeners and create a safe environment for teams to present their diverse viewpoints. By prioritising the right challenges and handling them, the scrum master can align the team’s efforts to organisational goals. Tailoring the facilitation structure as per the team’s maturity will help the teams develop both focus and clarity to help them achieve desired goals.
