Rotating the ScrumMaster Role
by Mike Cohn, 27 January 2012 | The Agile Blogosphere
This post is from Mike Cohn's Blog - Succeeding With Agile® by Mike Cohn. Click here to see the original post in full.
Some teams that struggle with choosing the best ScrumMaster decide that an appropriate strategy is to rotate the role among all team members. I don’t advocate this, as I don’t think it demonstrates an appropriate respect for the challenges and significance of the role. In my family, we rotate who cleans the table and loads the dishwasher. Any of us can do that job. We do not, however, rotate who cooks dinner. My wife is a far better cook than anyone else in the family. We want the cooking to be the best it can be, so we don’t rotate that job. If you want your Scrum team to be the best it can be, I do not recommend that you make a habit of rotating the job of ScrumMaster.
However, there are some occasions when you may want to rotate. The most common is when you want to create learning opportunities. For example, if team members are struggling to understand the duties of the ScrumMaster, they may want to consider rotating each team member through the role. This may allow each to develop an understanding of what it means to be a ScrumMaster. Similarly, if a team identifies four or five good ScrumMaster candidates among their ranks, it may want to rotate among them, giving each a chance to try the role. Then by considering the performance of each, the team will hopefully be able to choose the most appropriate ScrumMaster.
Bob Schatz and Ibrahim Abdelshafi of Primavera Systems point out another reason why rotating might be useful.
