PSM II: The Game-Changer for Scrum Masters
Today, I want to tackle an important question I often receive, “How will a PSM II course challenge your assumptions the most?
If so, you’re not alone. Many Agile enthusiasts, like you and me, grapple with a multitude of assumptions, and the PSM II course is precisely crafted to challenge these notions.
Buckle up because this journey will shift your perspectives! 🚀
Challenging Assumptions about Scrum Masters
What do you think a Scrum Master is? What do you believe a Scrum Master does?
We’re often inundated with myths about the Scrum Master role.
One foundational shift is redefining who a Scrum Master truly is. 🔍
The myths surrounding this role are numerous, and we continually address these misconceptions in the PSM II course. 🧩
So, Let’s go ahead and debunk a few:
Let me break a few myths surrounding the PSM II course challenges down:
The Jira Admin Myth: Contrary to some beliefs, think again when it comes to Jira Admin. Scrum Masters aren’t merely Jira admins. They’re so much more. It’s a disservice to box them into such a limited category.
The Problem Solver Myth: A common misinterpretation is that Scrum Masters exist purely to solve the team’s problems. In reality, they catalyse the removal of impediments — not necessarily doing the work but empowering the team to do so. Essentially, a Scrum Master aims to make their role almost redundant by fostering a self-sufficient team and pushing for self-reliance and reduced dependency.
The “Invisibly Present” Paradigm: This is a concept I adore and one of my cherished takeaways from the PSM II course is the idea of being ‘invisibly present’. A Scrum Master’s value isn’t in their overt actions but in their nuanced guidance. They shape and steer the way teams organise tasks. Yet, if they were to be absent for a fortnight, the team’s activities from retrospectives to daily scrums — would still proceed seamlessly. This is because teams under a proficient Scrum Master recognise the intrinsic value of these processes rather than feeling compelled by external pressure. That’s the mark of true influence!
Evolution from Scrum Master to Advanced Scrum Master
To me, this journey, this transition that I believe to be the pinnacle of the PSM II course from a foundational Scrum Master role to the advanced realms of Scrum expertise, represents the heart of the PSM II course. 🔄
We are shifting from a task-oriented Scrum Master to a guide operating in advanced Scrum methodologies. 🌟
It’s about that massive leap and transition into the advanced Scrum Master world.
Ready for More Insights?
I’d love to share more on this and other Agile, Scrum, and DevOps topics. If this resonates with you, consider my Agile and Scrum courses. 📣
And remember, I’m always eager to engage in the comments or over a coffee chat!
Reach out, and let’s transform your Scrum journey together.
Oh, that’s a good question. How will a PSM2 class help a Scrum Master progress in their career? I think the thing we tackle in the PSM2, or the advanced PSM, is the things.
Alright, how do I explain this? Craft is a great word for this. When you do things for long enough, craft builds up all the things that are holding you back, like the barnacles on a ship. They’re making it slower, it’s less effective, it’s less sleek, and the PSM2 is about scraping those barnacles off so that you can go win the race, so you can be more effective.
We pick up all sorts of weird things that we… it’s the way we work, right? Our ways of working get indoctrinated into the company’s way of working, and sometimes we’re forced at certain points in our career or in doing stuff to make compromises. Those compromises work great in that space, but then they become enshrined in the way we do things, our craft. We adopt some of that craft, and we need a little bit of a reset to figure out what is and isn’t the ship and what is the bit we can get rid of.
If I’m back to the barnacle analogy, the PSM is about removing the barnacles from the ship. That’s really what it’s about. It’s about identifying those things that you find that Scrum Masters get pushed towards in organisations because perhaps when they were starting out as a Scrum Master, they didn’t have the confidence to say no or the confidence to correct leadership or the confidence to challenge leadership and say, “No, we need to do things a little bit different to be more effective.”
Then that craft gets just added to our baggage. So it’s really that differentiation of, again, what does a professional Scrum Master look like? Here are a bunch of things that we’ve learned how to do, and then bring it towards what we do want people to do as a Scrum Master.
I think there’s lots of people who are Scrum Masters who perhaps have been Scrum Masters for quite some time and have had no formal training. They’ve not had any experience whatsoever of exposure to… maybe they might not even have ever read the Scrum Guide. That’s quite… I have met those folks as well.
They’ve been doing it, but they’ve been doing the role. They’ve been picking up the accountability, they’ve been doing the things in the organisation, and they don’t want to go do a Scrum Master class because they’re like, “Well, I know how to be a Scrum Master.” Right? They don’t, but I don’t know how to be a Scrum Master.
Perhaps the advanced Scrum Master is a good way to level set a lot of those myths, and that’s something that we do at the beginning of the PSM2, the advanced Scrum Master classes. We kind of try and kick some of those common myths that you see people fulfilling as a Scrum Master and reset very quickly.
At the start of the class, there’s a quick reset to here’s what it should look like. Based on what it should look like, what are a whole bunch of skills, workshops, activities that you could run with your teams? I feel like that’s what the advanced Scrum Master really teaches. It’s got that short, sharp level set at the beginning, and then it goes into a teaching through experience, right?
Through participation, teaching different techniques. We teach a whole bunch of different liberating structures to help not, you know, make getting a bunch of people together suck less because it generally sucks in organisations. How do different things go look at, right?
So how do you help the team understand and improve their definition of done? Well, there’s little workshops and things that people can take away and do that, which is why I think at the end of the class, there’s like 20 to 30 posters, a big infographic that you can take away to maybe leverage with teams and help them become more effective Scrum Masters.
How do I, as a more effective Scrum Master, help my team be more effective as well? So there’s kind of two sides to it. There’s the craft that we’ve built up doing the role, even if we wear a professional Scrum Master. Right? We passed our PSM1 like five years ago or even 10 years ago or 13 years ago, like myself.
We’ve built up some crafts and barnacles that get stuck to the hull. We need to knock them off, or we never had any formal training at all, and we’ve been doing the accountability, trying to do the accountability of the Scrum Master. Perhaps we’ve learned from other people’s… we’ve adopted other people’s barnacles onto our way of doing things, and we need that level set.
Then what are the tools and techniques we need? Thanks for watching the video. If you enjoyed it, please like, follow, and subscribe. I always reply to comments, and if you want to have a chat about this or anything else Agile, Scrum, or DevOps, then please book a coffee with me through Naked Agility.
