5 min
Scrum without a Scrum Master: what breaks and what does not
Many teams run Scrum with no dedicated Scrum Master. It works for a while; then three specific cracks appear.
The situation is common: the team runs sprints, dailies and retrospectives, but nobody has the Scrum Master role. At first it does not show. After two or three months, predictable cracks appear.
Crack 1: blockers get stuck
The daily surfaces that something is blocked — a permission, a decision from another team, a down environment. With nobody whose job is to chase that to resolution, the blocker recurs in the next daily, and the next.
Crack 2: the meetings hollow out
The retrospective becomes a fifteen-minute formality with no actions. The daily runs long and turns into group problem-solving. Nobody is making sure each meeting serves its function, so they lose it.
Crack 3: outside pressure erodes the process
When a deadline gets tight, the first thing sacrificed is the process work. With nobody protecting the framework, each sprint looks a little less like the last one until only the name is left.
The roles, events and antipatterns of Scrum, in detail, are in the Scrum guide.
- Scrum
- Agile
- Teams
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