The simple knee jerk answer would be to state, that as a role, this is what you do…. so all the time. But I don’t believe that is right now that simple?
I found this great survey … https://dzone.com/articles/scrum-master-duties-what-are-you-doing-all-day-sur - which helps as it means I don’t need to make it up! It’s worth a read .. but the conclusion from over 200 Scrum Masters was;
Survey
Scrum Master Duties: Doing the Math
A typical Scrum team based on this survey has more than seven members and runs a two-week sprint. On average, the team’s Scrum Master allocates his or her time roughly as follows, normalized to hours per week:
- Product backlog refinement: 1.00 hours/week
- Sprint planning: 0.75 hours/week
- Stand-ups: 1.50 hours/week
- Sprint review: 0.50 hours/week
- Sprint retrospective: 0.75 hours/week
- Learning: 2.00 hours/week
- Training of teammates: 3.00 hours/week
- Training of stakeholders: 2.00 hours/week
If you do the math — the total amount of time spent on Scrum ceremonies, educating herself, or training teammates and stakeholders, respectively, is about 11.50 hours/week.
So 11 1/2 hours ….. but then I looked at two parts
The numbers
The times above are based on ‘an average of what they do’ and not on ‘what they should do’ - these numbers are low for how Scrum Guides define the timeboxed activities, and low for how I see the time too…. I’d suggest something more like
- Product backlog refinement: 2.00 hours/week
- Sprint planning: 1 hours/week
- Stand-ups: 1.50 hours/week
- Sprint review: 0.50 hours/week
- Sprint retrospective: 0.75 hours/week Not a massive change but our time is now up to …. 12hr 45 mins / week,
Are we done .. I don’t think so … isn’t there more a Scrum Master can / should be doing?
What are we missing
Here’s some
- Working on impediments
- Preparing for meetings/events
- Gather Agile metrics and prepare reports.
- Meeting with other SMs - Scrum Guild
- Ensuring Jira / physical board is up to date
- .. …
This is really hard to put a figure too - and some could be contained in “learning, training” above …. but we could conservatively put 2hrs 15 mins on this …. (make my numbers better)
So we have a revised total of AT LEAST 15 hours …..
Agree / Disagree? ….. it’s 50% of a working week - when I look at how important the Scrum Master role is for the success of the team - it seems about right to me.