A Servant Leader (also known as a Scrum Master in Scrum) has primary responsibility for facilitating the learning and growth of one or more Lean | Agile teams in developing a lean-Agile mindset, improving practices and guiding teams to more predictable delivery. The Servant Leader plays a crucial role in facilitating Agile ceremonies and planning of releases, removing impediments, providing guidance, and supporting Lean | Agile teams. He or she also mentors other Team members on Lean | Agile values, principles, and practices.
Their Key Responsibilities are:
- Works with Backlog Owners and Implementation Team members to learn and practice healthy backlog grooming and prioritization practices.
- Supports the execution and improvement of backlog grooming.
- Prepares for and facilitates Big Room & Release planning with Lean | Agile Teams.
- Assists in dependency management and cross team coordination.
- Facilitates Team-level Agile Ceremonies.
- Facilitates continuous improvement and the development of a learning culture with Lean | Agile teams.
- Facilitates ceremonies, collaboration, communication, and conflict management.
- Teaches and train new team members on Lean |Agile mindset and frameworks, practices, and process.
- Influences the organization in the removal of organizational impediments and development of healthy Agile practices.
- Mentors the Lean | Agile Team on agile values, principles, and practices.
- Removes impediments to the team’s ability to perform.
- Acts as a buffer between external distractions to minimize disruptions.
- Assists in the coordination of operational issue resolution.
- Facilitates team development, mediates conflicts protecting the team and encourages healthy team dynamics.
- Fosters team responsibility, self-accountability, transparency and self-organization.
- Leverages coaching skills to help the team to solve its own problems.
- Introduces and encourages team to explore healthy Agile development practices, focus on quality and technical excellence, predictable delivery, automation, and continuous delivery.
- Teaches and encourages a balanced backlog that delivers valuable features for customers, reduces technical debt, provides business value, and enables product sustainability.
- Helps the team to develop, capture, and analyze metrics to facilitate team improvements.
- Promotes transparency through healthy communications and data integrity.
Apart from professional experience, anideal candidate for this role should be professionally trained as well. Common Lean | Agile certifications associated with this role, but not limited to, are:
- Certified Scrum Master(Scrum Alliance).
- Certified Advanced Scrum Master(Scrum Alliance).
- Certified Scrum Professional (Scrum Alliance).
- SAFe Scrum Master (Scaled Agile Institute).
- SAFe Advanced Scrum Master (Scaled Agile Institute).
- Kanban Foundations (Lean Kanban University).
- IC Agile Professional (IC Agile).
The ideal person will have a college degree or equivalent experience, with at least at least 4 years' experience as a Scrum Master type role, and hands-on experience with different Lean | Agile frameworks.