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Is the Scrum Master responsible for creating reporting on behalf of the development team to drive continuous improvement?
I currently do this, and use that as a basis to improve processes.
Other Scrum Masters however prefer to get the team to solutionize the problem at retrospectives and run work shops.
What is the right approach?
I would start by asking: What is the report and who is it for?
There's no singular right answer - I don't think it's safe to say that "the Scrum Master should create all reports on behalf of the development team" or "the Scrum Master should create no reports on behalf of the development team".
A Scrum Team contains three roles - Product Owner, Development Team, and the Scrum Master who provides services to these other roles. The Scrum Team also exists in the context of an organization, and the Scrum Master also provides services to the organization. These services tend to include ensuring common understanding, teaching or building methods and practices, teaching agility (and the Scrum framework), facilitation of events, removal of impediments to success, and improving the productivity of the teams and organizations. Producing reports isn't one of the defined services, but assisting in or removing impediments to creating reports does fall squarely into the realm of the Scrum Master.
However, depending on what the report is, the Scrum Master may be the best person to write it, based on their knowledge, experience, and insight. Generally, reports should be written by the person closest to the information and with the most knowledge. That may or may not be the Scrum Master.
Is the Scrum Master responsible for creating reporting on behalf of the development team to drive continuous improvement?
There is nothing in the Scrum Guide that says the Scrum Master is responsible for reporting. Reporting isn't mentioned under any of the other roles either.
This would suggest that reporting (if required) is owned by the whole Scrum team.
The Scrum Master as a member of the Scrum team may end up doing some reporting. However, it should be clear that this is not a responsibility of their role, just an agreement within the team as to who does the reporting.
What is the right approach?
I don't think they are alternatives, they are logical, sequential steps of escalation.
First the team should try to find a solution in a retrospective or workshop. If it's clear a solution cannot be found inside the team, it becomes an impediment. At that point, it needs to be reported higher up the chain and I think the Scrum Master is well suited to make sure the team speaks "with one voice". The Scrum Master is also able to follow up without impeding the development work and able to ask for suggestions from the other team's Scrum Masters on how they solved that problem for their team in their own Guilds or Tribes or whatever you want to call it.
So it's not one or the other. It's both. Team first, reporting up second.
1 of the 4 values of Agile is
Working Software Over Comprehensive Documentation
Reporting of any kind - physical or electronic - is a form of project documentation. It was observed that enormous amounts of time were spent on documenting the product for development. The list of such documents for example Technical specifications, technical requirements, technical prospectus, interface design documents, test plans, documentation plans was extensive and was a cause for the long delays in development.
Hence Agile Manifesto values documentation, but it values working software more. Agile does not eliminate documentation, but it streamlines it in a form that gives the developer what is needed to do the work.
As stated by others there is nothing specified in scrum guide to clearly tell who is supposed to do project reporting & hence its very important to know the whole context behind the need of Reporting - following are some key questions to consider
- what exactly are you reporting?
- Who is asking for such reporting?
- Are they not part of SCRUM team?
During any of your scrum retrospective meeting - you as a SM can bring this topic to brainstorm above points, uncover the need of such reporting, see if any gaps in team collaboration & communication etc.
And then as a SCRUM team you should be able to define who is supposed to reporting if needed after retrospection.
