Scrum Master vs Project Manager – everything you need to know

For a beginner in the IT world, the role of project manager and scrum master looks similar. But this is not true! Both characters have their separate existence and are distinct from others. In a project, both roles can be molded accordingly.

Let’s understand the basic difference between two by understanding each term in brief.

Who is a scrum master?

The work of scrum master is to support the team member and ensuring an agile principle is appropriately followed or not. In short, the SM works as a facilitator for the agile development team. We all know what scrum means! It is a methodology that helps a team to self organize and make changes in relation to agile principles. A scrum master ensures the smooth management of processes and information exchange.

Roles and responsibilities of scrum master –

For the smaller team of developers, the scrum framework is the best as the team can break their work into a splash to get the project done.

If you want to get your work done within the time limit, then scrum master is the best one to rely upon. Being a scrum master is a kind of art where there is a lot of quick planning and release planning process, which ensures SM scientific clarity of work gets done on time.

For better clarification, please read the roles and responsibilities points below.

• Sprint planning

• Clearing obstacles and problems

• Scrum master checks a good relationship between the product and the team owner and the outside team.

• Responsibly managing the scrum process

• Communicate team dynamics

• Guiding the scrum team to follow scrum practices

• Daily scrum meeting scheduling

• For deep focus, a scrum master removes the barrier for smooth functioning

• Muck in with the product backlog

• To ensure effectiveness, team scrum master establishes a proper environment.

• Protecting the team from outside distractions

The challenges faced by a scrum master

• Resisting change – the most frustrating roadblock is resistance, and it can come in any form.

• Misunderstanding process – there is room for great confusions because of daily fundamental change and implementation

• Adapting the changing roles is difficult – it can be scary as transitioning to scrum shakes up the roles of the whole team, departments, or even organization.

Now let’s understand who a project manager is?

From the above facts, it is clear that a scrum master is more focused on his/her scrum team to deliver maximum product value.

While a project manager has a wide area of control, they manage various teams and focus on the timely and efficient delivery of complex project results. The main work of a project manager is to achieve optimum efficiency and involving himself in several project activities.

Well, if we compare both the scrum master works look less, but it’s all about the risk involved in a particular project.

Project manager’s work involves less risk because they have the advantage of using traditional discipline project management approach. Nowadays, the scenario is not the same as traditional principles do not work or apply every time. Thus the project manger’s community has updated PMBOK guidelines with the introduction of agile principles in their 6th PMBOK edition.

It all depends on a project manager’s ability to judge better- like which approach will work better with the current project or scenario, and accordingly, they adopt the framework.

Roles and responsibilities of a project manager

• Reports the stakeholders on the progress of the project

• Budget management

• Allocate task and prioritize features

• Risk management

• Coordination and communication with dependent team

• Meeting project requirements and ensuring timely delivery of results

• Planning project activities

• Ensure project documentation and its timely availability

• Effective project quality control

• Highlight unresolved issues

• Maintain team dynamics

• And finally, scrum master ensures project result delivery and managing scope, budget, time, and resource efficiency.

Scrum Master and Project manager- are they similar?

By now, you must have known the difference between two, but also you must have realized the similarity. Though both roles have different appr

oaches, yet they are important and share a common thing. Let’s have a look at the similarity.

• Both are concerned about the performance of teams and want to improve efficiency.

• Both resolve issues by engaging with the team and solve conflicts.

• Scrum master and PM both are not the final decision making authority on the product requirements.

• Essential skillset and year of experience are required for both the post.

• They both have to understand the importance of quality work and output.

Conclusion-

Finally, we can conclude that a project manager is more of a leader, and the scrum master role is all about facilitating and coaching. Well, any startup or organization in an early stage of going agile may think a project manager’s role can be transferred into a scrum master. But again, this is a myth because both the role have different approaches and vary in responsibilities.

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