Scrum Masters should do Business Analysis for the Team.

Jeff Sutherland, the founder of Scrum, said, “The Scrum Master job was designed to be a half time job. Most of the great Scrum Masters I have worked with have been on the team doing sprint backlog.” August 2021 https://lnkd.in/eDx7dbYr

This matches my own experience. Doing the Scrum Master role for one team only took half my time. I spent the rest of my time helping the product owner and team define and manage the backlog — effectively being a Business Analyst for the team. This combination role worked super well. There is a lot of overlap between the Scrum Master and BA skill sets. Both have to be very good at communication, analysis and problem-solving. Both have to work closely with the Product Owner and the Team. And both have to understand the work that is being done, so they help people organise it. So it's very effective to have one person do both. It's much better than splitting the Scrum Master across two teams because it removes switching costs that eat up 20% of your time when you change contexts.

The exception to this is if you are in a very lean and agile organisation with no managers. In that case, the Scrum Master should help do the cross-team organisation that managers usually do as Jeff said, “Recently at Scrum Inc, where we have no managers we need to have Scrum Masters take on operational responsibility…