The Scrum Master is accountable for establishing Scrum as defined in the Guide, and for the Scrum Team's effectiveness. The Guide describes the work as service in 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.
Causing the removal of impediments is the one people misread. The Scrum Master makes removal happen, which is not the same as personally doing the work.
Serving the Product Owner
Four services again, all of them 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.
Note the last one. 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 of the accountability most often left undone, and it is where a Scrum Master with no organisational remit ends up managing a board instead.
The shape of the verbs
Every verb above is indirect. Coaching, helping, causing, facilitating and advising all describe someone who makes something possible rather than someone who does it. That pattern is what most scenario questions in this domain rely on, and an option in which the Scrum Master directs, assigns or decides on behalf of another accountability is describing something outside the role.