Leadership and Career Paths for ScrumMasters

Don is an entrepreneur and business leader with over 15 years experience specializing in aligning management-driven technologies and initiatives together with business and project strategies resulting in thoroughly planned and comprehensive business solutions. His expertise as a project manager, developer, tester, analyst, trainer, consultant, and business owner has spanned across diverse industries such as finance, retail, health care and information technology

  Agile   Career Development   Scrum  

A thread on the Project Management Central discussion board about the career path of the ScrumMaster got me thinking about this topic in depth. Much has been written and discussed on the central role of the ScrumMaster and his/her ability to facilitate self-organizing teams, remove impediments to project progression and create an environment of continuous improvements though servant leadership.

But much of this has been focused on the individual effort of leading a single team through the successful completion of a Scrum project. At some point, a person who has successfully established themselves in an organization (as the experienced ScrumMaster that has a proven track record of successfully completing critical Scrum projects) will be looked on to take on more responsibilities. What would these responsibilities be? What kind of career roadmap would be best suited for a person who is an established ScrumMaster?

Conventional ScrumMaster Career Paths
One obvious career path for the ScrumMaster would be to become a Scrum coach. Scrum Alliance has a formal Certified Scrum Coach program that is the most well known of these programs. The term “coach” is most suited to this role as--much like the ScrumMaster’s role of facilitating self-organizing teams--the Scrum coach would facilitate other ScrumMasters in the organization to self-organize themselves …

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