Free Scrum Training - The Scrum Roles

One of the biggest advantages of adopting scrum is the roles and responsibilities. They’re very well thought out and designed to reduce conflict if interest. Within Scrum there is no hierarchy with respect to the roles. The Scrum Master is not the boss of the team, and the Scrum Master is not subordinate to the Product Owner. Rather all three roles are peers … they’re equally balanced.

In this video I introduce the three scrum roles and talk very briefly on the different responsibilities. It’s important to realize that introducing Scrum is often hard and disruptive .. and, that is also the title of one of Ken’s most important papers.

Here’s a video introducing the roles and responsibilities of Scrum:

Transcript

Hello again, I’m Kane Mar. Scrum was designed with three equally yet distinct roles. These roles are; the Scrum Master, the Team and the Product Owner. Let’s look at each of these roles. The Scrum Master. The Scrum Master is responsible for removing any impediments that the team may have, for enforcing the scrum framework, making sure that the team is fully functional and productive, facilitating close co-operation across all the different roles to shield the team from any external interference and Scum Masters are expected to be change agents, they are expected to help the organisation change that it’s better able to do Scrum.

The team is a cross-functional unit whose ideal size is seven people plus or minus two. The team has the right to do whatever is required in order to meet the team goals, they are self organizing and at the end of the sprint, the team presents the result of the efforts to the product owner, the product owner owns the vision or the desired outcome of the project.

They are responsible for the budget or the ROI and they are responsible for the product backlog. The product owner, orders the product backlog in a single-rank order from highest priority to lowest priority. Product owners are also responsible for selecting product release dates. These are the only three roles specified within the Scrum framework, the scrum master, the team and the product owner.

Scrum has been described as being hard and destructive, part of this arises because of the defined roles. With these in mind, let me ask you a question. Where do you think the role of a Project Manager fits within scrum? Until next time, thank you.