The Scrum Master is accountable for establishing Scrum as defined in the Guide, and for the Scrum Team's effectiveness. Those are two accountabilities rather than one, and the first is not confined to the team, since establishing Scrum means helping everyone understand Scrum theory and practice, inside the team and in the organisation around it.
Effectiveness is about how well the team works rather than how much it produces. A Scrum Master is not accountable for delivery and is accountable for the conditions that make delivery possible. The Guide calls the Scrum Master a true leader who serves the Scrum Team and the wider organisation, and it divides that service into three directions.
Serving the Scrum Team
The Guide lists four services to the team.
- Coaching the team in self-management and cross-functionality.
- Helping it focus on creating high value Increments that meet the Definition of Done.
- Causing the removal of impediments to progress.
- Ensuring all Scrum events take place, are positive and productive, and stay within their timebox.
The fourth is narrower than it sounds, since ensuring an event happens is not the same as chairing it. The Daily Scrum belongs to the Developers, who may invite the Scrum Master to facilitate.
Serving the Product Owner
Four services again, each supporting the accountability rather than taking it over.
- Helping find techniques for effective Product Goal definition and Product Backlog management.
- Helping the Scrum Team understand the need for clear and concise Product Backlog items.
- Helping establish empirical product planning for a complex environment.
- Facilitating stakeholder collaboration as requested or needed.
Stakeholder collaboration is facilitated when it is asked for, so a Scrum Master who convenes stakeholders over the Product Owner's head has stepped outside the role.
Serving the organisation
The four services here reach past the team into the organisation around it.
- Leading, training and coaching the organisation in its Scrum adoption.
- Planning and advising Scrum implementations.
- Helping employees and stakeholders understand and enact an empirical approach for complex work.
- Removing barriers between stakeholders and Scrum Teams.
This is the part most often left undone, and it is where a Scrum Master with no organisational remit ends up managing a board instead. Most of what slows a team comes from outside it, in funding cycles that assume fixed scope and approval gates nobody owns.
Causing removal is not doing the removal
The Guide says the Scrum Master causes the removal of impediments rather than removing them, and the distinction is practical. An impediment the team can clear for itself should be cleared by the team, because a Scrum Master who takes every obstacle away trains it to escalate instead of to solve, which is the opposite of self-management.
What the Scrum Master owns is that the impediment gets removed by somebody. That might mean making it visible to a manager who can act, changing the policy that keeps producing it, or refusing to let it sit unspoken for another Sprint. It also means telling the real blocker apart from the irritation.
What the accountability is not
The Scrum Master is not a project manager. There is no plan to own, no schedule to defend and no scope to hold the team to, because the Product Owner decides what is built and the Developers decide how much they take on. Reporting progress against a plan of their own takes back the decisions Scrum distributed.
Nor is the role administrative or directive. Booking a room and writing up a Retrospective are things a Scrum Master may do to help, and neither is the accountability. The Scrum Master also does not assign work, because the Developers decide who does what, and handing out tasks recreates the status meeting the Daily Scrum exists to replace.
The shape of the verbs
Every verb in the Guide's three lists is indirect. Coaching, helping, causing, facilitating and advising all describe somebody who makes something possible rather than somebody who does it, which is what most scenario questions here rely on. An option in which the Scrum Master directs, assigns or decides for another accountability sits outside the role.