A ScrumMaster should sit next to her/his team. That’s the suggestion of literature, practicioners and wisdom of the crowd. But in reality most ScrumMasters I know serve two teams. At least in enterprise-size companies, where the number of teams is big enough. Furthermore they are often busy with organization-wide agility and collaboration stuff. This seems to be the favored setup in many big companies.
But this is just a compromise – and not even a good one. Assume that we have teams that didn’t already reache the state of hyper-productive, high performant, self reflective Agile-evangelistic developers.
So – what does a busy ScrumMaster miss, if s/he can’t look at only one team?
- Developers try to solve problems on their own for a long time, trapped by their ego, instead of asking for help.
- People don’t ask the experienced guys for help.
- Discussions between team members are unproductive.
- Impediments will be accepted as they are instead of solving them.
- Questions will not be clarified together with the PO.
There may be more such things – common for all: they hinder optimum performance. And the question emerges: “Why does this take so long in this team? Is this normal?” Maybe it isn’t (depends on what is normal). But surely there is room for improvement. If the chances are recognized.
So the advice “one team per ScrumMaster” has its clear right to exist. If this is not possible the challenge is to organize your work as ScrumMaster to achieve best possible results. Maybe you are able to sit one sprint next to one of your teams and the next sprint next to the other. And maybe you can manage it to stay with your team at least a complete day per sprint to observe how the work together. But don’t miss the chance to get deeper insight into their work.
