Top Skills of a Scrum Master

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Hello everyone, I know for a beginner it used to very difficult to understand what are skills a person should have to become a Scrum Master. In this blog, I am going to discuss the top skills of the Scrum Master. Before moving to know the top skills of Scrum Master we should know who is Scrum Master?

Who is a scrum master?

Scrum Master is the servant leader liable for ensuring the team lives agile values and principles and follows the processes and practices. The Scrum Master is usually considered a teacher for the team, helping the team do the simplest work it possibly can. They can also be thought of as a process owner for the team, creating a balance with the project’s key stakeholder, who is mentioned because of the product owner. They seldom play a role of a mentor and helps the team navigate and achieve deliverable.

Top Skills of Scrum Master

Top Skills of Scrum Master
Top Skills of Scrum Master

Here are the some of top skills of a Scrum Master that he/she should have:

Remove Barriers and Keep the Team on Track

One of the most important skills of a Scrum Master is to remove the impediments of a development team. As a scrum master if you want to see success then you should always remove their impediments on the highest priority so that your team can work freely.

Facilitation

Scrum Master also acts as a facilitator within the team. A great Scrum Master is a great facilitator, otherwise, the Scrum Master will be seen as not more than a master of ceremonies or even an event organized. A great Scrum Master is suitable to grease an event that leads to a high-quality decision that’s possessed by the whole group attending that event. By dereliction, the Scrum Master facilitates the Scrum events Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospectives or indeed a Product Backlog refinement session.

Encourages Collaboration

Scrum Masters’ liabilities extend beyond their own development squad. To remove impediments to their squad, Scrum Masters unite with stakeholders and other dev squads. Some Scrum experts say this commerce falls outside of the traditional Scrum Master part, but it’s necessary to work, and you are the right person to do it. As a Scrum Master, use leadership chops to unite across squads, negotiate schedules, and grease specialized meetings.

Strong Scrum and Agile Training

The main purpose of having a Scrum Master is to ensure that the squad is laboriously following the guidelines of Scrum and Agile. Although the idea of Scrum may feel simple and straightforward, Scrum comes with its own set of terms and expressions that leaders need to understand in order to use the frame duly. Thus, knowledge of these systems and languages is absolutely necessary.

Leadership

The Scrum Master acts as a glue between the product owner and the development group. As a scrum master, you should have leadership qualities so that you can lead the team with a good approach and the best practices. The product owner will create the stories. The Scrum team will finalize the stories and estimate them. The Scrum Master ensures the development group fully supports story refinement(also called backlog grooming).

Tools Expertise

Scrum Master should have advanced knowledge of all the project management tools and collaboration and software documentation. Jira, Trello, Asana, Confluence, etc are some of the examples on which a Scrum Master should have expertise. They should also be experts in Excel sheets so that they can create the metrics of agile with themself.

Listening

As a Scrum Master, being a good leader he/she should also be a good listener. Listening is a must-have skill of a  Scrum Master. They have to pay attention to the daily stand-up call, sprint planning, review, and retrospective.

Risk Management

Risk management is one of the most important skills that a Scrum Master should have. It helps them in risk identification through mitigation and monitoring. Some risks are related to process, skills, or technical risks. Scrum masters should identify the risk and find out its fix for that risk before it becomes a bottleneck for the team.

If you want to learn about Scrum Master and its roles and responsibilities, please refer to this blog.

Written by 

Prince Agrahai is a Scrum Master at Knoldus. He has good skills in Agile Methodology and Scrum Framework. He is also a good team player and likes to achieve milestones together. Also, getting up early motivates him for his work. On the personal front, he loves to travel, play cricket and watch movies.