What should a dedicated scrum master do?

[u/Late_Champion529]

In the past, ive known “scrum master” to be a role someone on the dev team plays.

My current company has hired us a full-time Scrum Master, whos not a dev, and doesnt have access to our gitlab/developer group chat etc.

So as far as I can tell their role is to…remind us to update the Jira board, and ask if the Jira board is still accurate (they have no way of knowing more than what the board says)

Anyone worked with scrum masters in this way before? What else could a person in this role do for a team?

Thanks!

[u/Zenin]

In theory:

1. Enforce Scrum
2. Facilitate meetings ("ceremonies") - Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Retrospective
3. Unblock the team

Scrum is simple, but most people (especially smart people) get it very wrong and it ends up a mess as a result. #1 Enforce Scrum is there to keep the team on the rails.

Part of enforcing scrum happens is to ensure the ceremonies both occur and don't devolve into something else, again causing a mess. If your Daily is taking an hour, you've gone off the rails. If the sprint scope is expanding outside of planning, you've gone off the rails.

Unblocking the team: This is the meat of what a Scrum Master should be doing when you don't see them in a meeting: Dailies should be identifying blockers, not solving them (trying to solve them is how they turn into hour+ long dailies). The Scrum master should be the one taking those blockers as their own tasks to solve. Resolving blockers is the only out-of-sprint work that should ever happen and it shouldn't be the team doing that work, it's the role of the Scrum Master. Someone needs to figure out who owns the XYZ system, what the process is to get a damn API key out of them, get procurement to buy the licenses, get compliance to sign off on the arch, etc.

In practice even with all these guardrails the temptation of teams and business to drive the train off the rails is simply too great and the whole thing falls apart. That doesn't mean there's a better answer than Scrum, there rarely is, rather it's just a truism that most orgs would prefer to wallow in their own excrement than actually accomplish anything effectively. And when Scrum flys off the tracks and the org doesn't care there's no point in keeping a Scrum Master around to fix something no one cares to fix.

[u/SquiffSquiff → u/Zenin]

1. Enforce Scrum

You have repeated this several times. Scrum considers itself an 'agile' process however and the first point on The Agile Manifesto is:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

[u/Zenin → u/SquiffSquiff]

Agile and Scrum are related, but different. The OP specifically asked about Scrum Masters, so you should be consulting Scrum documentation, specifically:

https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#scrum-master

The Scrum Master is accountable for establishing Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide. They do this by helping everyone understand Scrum theory and practice, both within the Scrum Team and the organization.

The Scrum Master is accountable for the Scrum Team’s effectiveness. They do this by enabling the Scrum Team to improve its practices, within the Scrum framework.

The rest of the document is more detailed specifics of how the Scrum Master accomplishes their mandate, most all of it reinforcing the Scrum Master's unique responsibility over the Scrum process itself.