Covering for a Scrum Master on Vacation
Generally if a Scrum Master is off on vacation the role should temporarily fall to someone on the team to cover the standups, attempt to remove impediments, and generally keep things moving.
What doesn’t work that well is having another Scrum Master who has no relation to the project step in help. They don’t have any context to work from and at most they’re going to mechanically record status updates on tasks. Maybe they can try to remove some impediments, but again they lack context.
Given a choice leave it up to the team who fills in the Scrum Master role while they’re on vacation.
Ed Gibbs @ October 27, 2006
When you talk about a Scrum Master recording status updates on tasks, it prompts me to ask what the specific responsibilities of the Scrum Master are in your organization.
They’re daily task is running the standups and updating a spreadsheet with all of the Sprint tasks. They are also expected to remove impediments, but the effort that goes into that varies widely.
We’re talking about an organization with mostly PMI PMPs, a semi PMO organization and project managers who were largely stuck in a project admin role. So adoption is coming along, but slowly.
Thanks for the feedback. I wouldnt’ want to make any assumptions without knowing the environment there, but I wonder about the choice of words “run the scrum” and about what the spreadsheet is for. What do the teams do if neither the PM nor the ScrumMaster is present? Do they carry on with the scrum normally, or do they wait to be told what to do?
Are you tracking “tasks” in the WBS/Gantt sense, or are you using the word “task” the way we might ordinarily use the word “story?” Is the spreadsheet the basis of a burndown chart, or is it a Gantt-style thing?
Just wondering, not criticizing.
If PM/ScrumMaster issn’t present, they tend to just run the meeting themselves.
Task is a smaller unit of work to accomplish a story (generally part of a use case in our context.
The spreadsheet does drive a burndown chart, but generally people don’t pay too much attention to the burndown chart.