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I live in the City of San Diego and we have an estimated 1.4 million people living within the city limits. Could you ever imagine someone asking the Mayor, or the City Council, “Do we really need so many fulltime fire fighters?” Yet, a variation of this topic comes up over-and-over again when talking about the role of ScrumMaster, “Do we really need a fulltime ScrumMaster?”
For the last five years, I have done my best to answer this question. I can show them the list of 42 tasks for a ScrumMaster from Bernd Schiffer and the ScrumMaster checklist from Michael James. We can have a twenty minute discussion on why these tasks are important, valuable and worthy and I can tell the story of Cenée LaTulippe. And, yet people still ask the question, “Do we really need a fulltime ScrumMaster?”, which suggests they are not buying it.
When I gave my keynote speech (in Spanish) at Scrum Day Oviedo on the topic of Fearless Journey, I stumbled across the metaphor of ScrumMaster as a fire fighter. This metaphor seems to resonate with some people, so let’s explore ScrumMaster as fire fighter to help people understand more about the benefits of fulltime ScrumMasters and respond to this common misconception.