[MUSIC] Welcome to this module on the skills
necessary to be a successful Scrum Master. After watching this video, you'll be able
to, summarize skills necessary to be a successful Scrum Master, and
explain the need for each skill. There are a number of key skills
a Scrum Master must learn and become proficient at to be effective. Much of the information shared
is extracted from a document called the Scrum Guide. This document provides a blueprint
to effectively implement Scrum and was originally created and updated by some of the founders of
the original Scrum methodology. First and foremost, the Scrum Master must
be an expert in the Scrum framework. This person must possess a thorough
understanding of Scrum methodology. The team in the organization
expect the Scrum Master to know how to guide the organization. In some cases, you may be expected to lead
an organization through a transformation from traditional project
management methodology to Scrum. A Scrum Master must have the skills
necessary to be an effective servant leader. To be effective, the following servant
leadership skills are essential, manage relationships, encourage and
create development opportunities, build effective communications with
the team and across the organization. Effective communication builds trust and
credibility and increases the team's motivation to commit
to doing the work that needs to be done, encourage the team to embrace success and
provide development opportunities to grow, facilitate collaboration and
act as a diversion shield. Support everyone to be creative and
innovative, encourage the team's participation,
understanding, and creativity, and create a sense of shared responsibility. A team can generally accomplish far
more together than a single individual. In addition, shield the team from external
distractions as much as possible so they can concentrate on the work at hand,
remove organizational impediments and obstacles, look for issues,
blockers existing processes, and out-of-date practices that limit
the team's effectiveness and pave the way to process improvements and
improve performance. The Scrum Master facilitates end
of sprint retrospectives and can help achieve this goal. Educate all stakeholders on
both the value of Scrum and how effective implementation
can provide value. The Scrum Master must act as a change
agent to move the organization forward. As a Scrum Master,
develop your coaching skills. A Scrum Master is expected to coach
team members to become self-directing, self-organizing, and
skilled in cross-functional communication. A key goal is to enable any and all team members to assume
the role of a Scrum Master. Help the Scrum team focus on creating
high-value increments that meet the definition of Done. An increment is a deliverable from a
sprint that provides value to a customer. Done indicates that the team was able
to accomplish all solution criteria for a user story and
gain sign off from the customer. General management skills are also needed
to ensure that the team stays focused and doesn't deviate from
what needs to be done. The goal of each sprint is to create and
deliver a Minimum Viable Product, or MVP. A Scrum Master needs to
understand the purpose and desired outcomes of all scrum events and
ceremonies. They must ensure all Scrum events
take place and are positive, productive, and kept within the timebox. These include sprint planning,
the daily stand-up meeting, demos, and retrospectives. A Scrum Master also needs to be
an effective process manager. A Scrum Master must be able to identify
and address sources of conflict. This includes promoting functional
conflict that may move the sprint forward, or mitigating dysfunctional conflict
which can get quickly out of hand and impact a sprint negatively. Scrum Masters must be skilled
negotiators and problem-solvers. Without these skills, it is impossible
to help the team achieve success. This may involve negotiation with
stockholders, the product owner, other managers, and
anyone who influences the team's success. They should know how to create
opportunities to collaborate and how to facilitate a team to stay on track. For example, a Scrum Master may need to bring in
a different Scrum team to collaborate if there is an intersection between
the work that these teams are doing. If the only way to get increments to
meet the definition of Done is through collaboration and problem-solving, the
Scrum Master must facilitate that process. Scrum Masters need to be effective in
facilitating the estimation process and ensuring expert input is received
as needed from the right sources. The Scrum Master assists in ensuring
that the team understands its velocity. Velocity is defined as a measure
of how much work a team can successfully accomplish in a sprint. Do not overpromise and underdeliver. The Scrum Master needs to understand
the role of the Product Owner and assist this individual to be successful. This includes assisting the Product Owner
in product goal definition and product backlog development and
management, ensuring all stakeholders understand and agree with all
the user stories in the backlog, and facilitating stakeholder
collaboration as requested or needed. The Product Owner has
distinct responsibilities. However, a good Scrum Master ensures
the success of the Product Owner. The product owner is responsible for
developing user stories, creating and managing the product backlog, prioritizing
user stories, and working with the team to determine which stories can be
accomplished in a given sprint. The Product Owner also needs to refine
the backlog to ensure user stories in the queue are ready to
implement in the next sprint. The quality of the backlog directly
impacts the Scrum Master and the team. The Scrum Master assists
in the refinement process. In Scrum,
decisions are made on an observation and experimentation rather than
a detailed upfront planning. Empirical process control is
a concept that must be understood and embraced by a Scrum Master. It relies on the three main ideas of
transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Transparency, transparency
allows all facets from any Scrum process to be observed by anyone. There are no secrets in Scrum. This provides an easy and transparent flow
of information through the organization and creates an open work culture. A Scrum Master must be transparent. Inspection, the Scrum Master needs to
ensure that the information is shared with all key stakeholders. This includes access to user stories and
the product backlog, accessibility to information radiators
such as the kanban board and sprint burndown chart, and
invitations to product demos and reviews. Adaptation, adaptation is the ability to
learn and improve through transparency and information sharing noted in the first
two ideas of transparency and inspection. In this video, you learned that a Scrum
Master may not have all of the answers. However, they do lead
the way to find them. This requires knowing how to set realistic
goals and achieve them, understanding the capabilities of your team, and knowing
how to drill down when clarity is needed. Arguably, the most important skill
a Scrum Master must pursue is to become an effective communicator. Strong communication skills impact every
key skill we define in this skill set inventory. [MUSIC]