There is the kind most people look for today. You can see help wanted ads for them everywhere; they are the Scrum Master/Project Manager. This is a symptom of how far Agile has come and how far it has yet to go.

These are not real Scrum Masters, they are Project Managers in disguise. So many people cannot imagine not having a PM, not having someone perform the PM function that they conflate the idea of the Scrum Master with a Project Manager. Speaking as someone who has been both, these two roles are not at all analogous. Scrum does not use Project Managers because it doesn’t need them. Yet so many companies I see today that think they are “going Agile” are hiring this combination of SM/PM. All I can say is that if you are combining those two roles, you are not doing Scrum. You may think you are, you may have all the window dressings of Scrum, but you are not doing Scrum, and the likelihood that you are Agile at all is very low to non-existent. The two roles are like matter and anti-matter; they cannot exist in the same space, much less the same person, or the universe will implode.

Conversely, if you see a help wanted ad for a real Scrum Master, you are going to see some reference to the Scrum Guide, to the Agile Manifesto principles, to removing impediments, to team morale, to servant leadership. You will not see references to project plans or Gantt charts. I see many, many help wanted ads for Project Managers and precious few for Scrum Masters. They stick out like diamonds in the rough. They are written with passion and feeling. They appeal on an emotional level where the cold dead PM job description should be dead and gone in my view, at least when it comes to software development. Until this happens, Agile may have “arrived” and hit a kind of critical mass, however, there will still be work for me and others who are on fire with the values and the principles of Agile to come in and attempt to clean up the mess left by those who cannot (or will not) tell the difference.