Full steam ahead but who is steering the ship?
One of the key roles for an agile team is the Scrum Master (or otherwise known as the Iteration Manager). Hartman (2009) summaries the Scrum Master's responsibilities as: "The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring that the Team adheres to Scrum values, practices, and rules. The Scrum Master helps the Scrum Team and the organization adopt Scrum. The Scrum Master teaches the Team by coaching and by leading it to be more productive and produce higher quality products. The Scrum Master helps the Team understand and use self-management and cross-functionality. However, the Scrum Master does not manage the team; the team is self-managing." But who should be a Scrum Master, when the team may already have a team leader or manager? I'll briefly explore the opportunities and challenges of two main approaches. Team leader as scrum master: Opportunity : As Hartman stated above, the team should be self managing but when disputes arise, the team leader has