With the steep upward trend in the adoption of agile practices across the IT industry, various frameworks have gained momentum. This has led to an appetite for exploring new ways of working and setting performance benchmarks. More and more organizations are looking for people who can help them effectively run in a new environment comprising frameworks based on Agile and its variants.
Hence, the demand for certified SAFe® Scrum Masters has gained momentum in the last couple of years. The organizations, now, realize the criticality of this role for the implementation of scaled agile and its practices.
What is SAFe?
SAFe helps in scaling the agile practices up to the enterprise level. The organization as a whole works together in delivering a solution to the client. All the layers have their purpose and deliverables. It has been designed to “continuously and efficiently deliver value on a regular and predictable schedule.”
Over the years, the Scaled Agile framework has evolved as one of the highly appreciated frameworks across the IT industry. The scaled agile framework has different configurations that can be used for the need of the organization. The model is made in such a way that it can cater to all sizes and complex environments.
Responsibilities of a SAFe Scrum Master
Kaizen as the way of delivery: The SAFe Scrum Master helps the team to learn from their mistakes and instills a sense of ownership for their actions and commitment. With the facilitation of the team retrospective, they try to surface hidden emotions and find new effective ways of improvement. Also, they help the team with problem-solving methods to create a better self-organizing team.
Towards achieving sprint/release goals: The SAFe Scrum Master helps the team in creating increments that not only add value but also improve productivity. They help the teams to become more predictable. With effective facilitation, the team comes out with positive outputs after the end of each ceremony. The SAFe Scrum Master helps them through planning their iterations and scaling them up to the release planning level. They help organize the PI events which require certain pre-work for better PI outputs.
Achieving the objective of release train: As part of scaling agile, the SAFe Scrum Master helps in aligning the teams with larger release trains, ensuring the common organization goal is met.
Support the product owner for product backlog management and prioritization: The SAFe Scrum Master assists the Product Owner to manage the backlog and helps them with prioritization and estimation methods to define a healthy backlog.
Being a change agent for SAFe adoption: The SAFe Scrum Master serves as a pillar in the implementation of scaled agile and its practices. They coach the different layers in the framework by participating in the Scrum Master Community of Practice and supporting the organization’s coaches.
Manage impediments backlog and remove them: Many times, the implements go beyond the scope of the team's work span, and in such cases, the Scrum Master can reach out to external entities in getting the issues resolved. This helps in the timely execution of the sprint.
Endorses SAFe practices: SAFe offers direction to support the teams in continuously improving the quality of their deliverables and adhering to the Definition of Done.
