The Scrum Roles Workshop

by · January 22, 2023

As a Scrum Master I was looking for a way to help my team understand the accountabilities of the scrum roles and to make it relevant for them in a playful way. I thought about the Scrum Event Puzzle that I did quite some time ago and used the same concept for teaching the scrum roles.

The goal of the workshop: to help the team understand what the scrum guide has to say about the scrum roles, and discover the gap between the team’s practice and the scrum guidelines (and of course how to close this gap!).

Preparing the Workshop

I created this Mural board with empty columns for every scrum role, and pasted all statements about scrum roles from the Scrum Guide randomly on the board, for example:

  • “Helping find techniques for effective Product Goal definition and Product Backlog management”
  • “Creating and clearly communicating Product Backlog items”
  • “Instilling quality by adhering to a Definition of Done”
  • etc.
Scrum Roles Workshop

Facilitating the Scrum Roles Workshop

During the session we went through the following steps:

  1. Make 3 groups (one for product owner, one for developers, and one for the scrum master role)
  2. Each group finds the statements for their scrum role.
  3. Discussion with the team: are the statements in the right column? After that a final check with the scrum guide.
Scrum Roles Workshop

After that we went to part 2:

  1. Divide the 3 columns with a line, with a happy smiley face above the line and a sad smiley face below it. 
  2. Move the statements that the team already applies in their scrum practice above the line, and the ones that the team can improve on below it.                                                      
  3. Identify the improvement you want to address first and what actions to take in the upcoming sprint.
Scrum Roles Workshop

What we learned 

This exercise really helped the team to understand what the scrum guide says. It visualized the gap between the team’s practice and the scrum guidelines and helped the team to define action for improvement.

So if you want to help your team understand the scrum roles, or if you’d like to help them refresh their knowledge, this is a fun way to do it! 

If you’d like to facilitate this session for your team you can find the template here.

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