Scrum is a framework introduced in 1993 by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland and has experienced significant growth in recent years. Scrum is currently used in almost every firm across the world. Scrum masters ensure that a business absorbs and leverages the value that the scrum can provide.
Before you begin learning how to become a scrum master, here's a primer on scrum.
What exactly is Scrum?
Scrum is a prominent framework for enabling teams to collaborate. Groups may use Scrum to assist them:
- Learn from your mistakes.
- Work on difficulties on your own.
- Consider their wins and losses.
- Deliver deliverables efficiently
- Use your time and money wisely.
- Divide projects into sprints, which are timed iterations.
- Improve visibility for all team members
- Regularly incorporate client and consumer feedback and
- Pay attention to the work of individual team members.
- Following that, learn all you need to know about the duties of a qualified scrum master.
What exactly is a Scrum Master?
A scrum master leads the team and manages the project, guiding the team and the product owner and ensuring that team members adhere to agile ideals and practices. A scrum master facilitates communication and cooperation among the company, the product owner, the team, and other persons involved. A scrum masterworks behind the scenes and is not involved in product conceptualization or strategy. A Scrum Master knows how Disciplined Agile Methodlogy helps the teams to embrace the project.
So, let's look at what a scrum master's responsibilities are. They have a high-level perspective, allowing them to assist the team in understanding technological and organizational dependencies while dealing with chokepoints.
Scrum Master Responsibilities
- Ensure that the team uses agile methods in their work.
- Organizing daily scrum meetings can assist the team in understanding what they accomplished yesterday, what they want to make today and the difficulties they encountered.
- We maintain a positive connection between the product owner and the team and other components outside the group.
- A scrum master also ensures that the team is making progress, that they are working on the proper tasks, that any hurdles they may be experiencing are removed, and that they are protected from distractions.
Do you want to know how a scrum master contributes to the other vital components of a scrum framework? Here's the solution:
1. The Product Developer
- The scrum master ensures that the team understands the scope and goals of the project.
- Assists the product owner in maintaining the product backlog.
- Sets up events such as daily standups (scrum events) as needed.
2. The Development Group
- The Scrum Master helps the development team become self-organized.
- Aids in the removal of difficulties encountered by developers
- Creates scrum events such as daily standups (per the requirement)
3. The Organization as a Whole
- The scrum master assists the company in implementing the scrum approach in their workflow.
- Coaches the organization on how to implement a functional scrum framework.
- Keeps the organization and project stakeholders up to date on the status of the scrum team's initiatives.
The next question that may spring to mind is, "How can I become a scrum master?" Here's your answer:
What Does it Take to Become a Scrum Master?
1. Agile and Scrum Training
To securely include the approaches, you must have a thorough awareness of the concepts, phrases, systems, and terminologies that must be comprehended. An Agile Certification would also aid in knowing the many scrum procedures that must follow. It will also substantially influence the team's success and, by extension, the project.
2. Technical Knowledge
A scrum master would often assist software development teams in developing programs that minimize bottlenecks and must grasp the technical words and processes involved in the process—knowledge of tools such as Jira and Asana would be precious to the scrum master.
3. Coaching Skills
A scrum master with solid teaching abilities may assist teams unfamiliar with Scrum works. A scrum master must know what to do and explain how and why. They also serve as a coach, encouraging members to develop their skills and shortcomings. They collaborate with each team member to maximize the team's potential.
4. Conflict Resolution
If the team's disagreements cannot be resolved among themselves, a scrum master handles them to guarantee the team's progress is not hampered. A scrum master is expected to be a skilled negotiator and facilitator. They must have the necessary interpersonal skills to resolve these issues and find an acceptable solution for all parties concerned.
5. Management
A scrum master must be able to behave as a team member and prioritize the team's requirements over the individual's demands, and they must be a team player and a team player.
A Scrum Master's Salary
In the United States, a certified scrum master makes around 97 thousand US dollars per year. (Glassdoor)
In India, a scrum master makes around 14 lakh rupees per year. (Glassdoor) A vital sign of the job role's great potential.
Lean thinking is a type of business methodology that is designed to provide a way to think about how to organize the human activities for delivering more profits to the society and worth to the individuals in the elimination of waste. The main motive of lean thinking is to form a lean enterprise that will sustain growth by supporting customer satisfaction along with employee satisfaction. This serves innovative products or services profitably by reducing the needless costs to customers, suppliers and the environment. Lean thinking helps the individuals in identifying the wasted time and efforts on their job and even better way to work together for improving the processes by eliminating these wastes. Through this, the enterprise will be able to deliver more results at lesser expenses while developing the employee's confidence, competence and the ability to work with the others.
5 principles that will include your workplace efficiency are:
Defining Value:
For understanding the first principle you have to understand what value is. Value is nothing but the amount the customer is ready to pay for. It is vital to find out the actual need of the customers. sometimes it may happen the customer may not know what they are looking for. This takes place especially when it comes to novel products and technologies. There are many procedures to find out what the customer is looking for through interviews, surveys, demographic information, and web analytics. By making use of these qualitative and quantitative techniques you will be able to discover what is the need of the customer and what the customers want and how they want the products or services to get delivered and the price they proposed.
Map the value streams:
The second important principle is identifying and mapping the Value stream. Here, the aim is to make use of the customer’s value as a reference point and identifying the activities which contribute to these values. Those products that do not add value to the end customers are considered waste. These wastes are broken down into two groups: one is the non-value added but necessary and the other non-value added but unnecessary. The former needs to be reduced as much as possible but the latter is a complete waste and should be deleted. By eliminating the unnecessary waste processes or steps you will be able to make sure that the customers are getting exactly what they want and the cost of producing the product and services also reduces.
Creating flow:
Well, after the removal of the wastes from the value streams following actions are taken to make sure that the flow of the remaining steps runs smoothly without any interruption or delays. Some of the strategies for value-adding activities flow effortlessly involves breaking down steps, leveling out the workload, reconfiguring the production steps, forming the cross-functional departments and coaching the employees to be multi-skilled and adaptive.
Create Pull:
The main aim of the pull-based system is limiting the inventory as well as work in process items that ensure that the requisite materials and information are all available for the smoother flow of work. On the other hand, a pull-based system helps in on-time delivery and manufacture where the products are created on time which is needed and in quantities required. The pull-based system is crafted out of the need of the end customers. By following the value streams, you will make sure that the product which is produced will be able to meet the demands of the customers.
Pursuing Perfection:
By following the first four steps you will be able to prevent wastes. Last but not the least Pursuing perfection is one of the important steps among all the other. Moreover, it makes the lean thinking and continuous process as a part of the organizational culture. Every employee needs to strive towards perfection while delivering the products that are based on the need of the customer. Thus, the company must be a learning organization and should always seek something better every day.
Conclusion:
With the introduction of the Agile methodology, there is a drastic change in the work process. Lean thinking helps the organization in its growth by removing waste. Lean helps the manager by finding out the inefficiencies and delivering the best value to the customers. Thus, this helps in forming an efficient and effective organization. Moreover, the principles help in crafting the proper flow of work process as well as developing improvement in the culture.
If you want to opt for any Agile certification course, you can become a part of LeanWisdom one of the leading Agile certification providers. Here, you will get the opportunity to get trained by renowned trainers who has hands-on experience in implementing Agile and Scaled Agile. To know about their upcoming batches and courses you can visit their website.
