Beyond Certification: A Deeper Dive Into the PSM II Course
Again, I’m answering a commonly asked question: ’ Is the PSM II course (Professional Scrum Master II) simply a validation of your skills, or does it help to develop your abilities and competencies as a Scrum Master?'
Although this is a commonly asked question, I think it requires an explanation and the answer may surprise you.
So, let’s unpack this one. 🚀
The Difference Between Validation and Skill Development
Another interesting question that came to me from this article’s title is whether certificates are validation or evolution.
📜💡
The PSM II, an advanced Scrum Master class, is, in my opinion, more about skill development than just validating your existing skills. If you’re attending the PSM II class simply to validate your abilities, you could just take the assessment and skip the class!
Save yourself time; there’s no need to go through the rigmarole.
It’s that straightforward. 🎯
There isn’t a strong correlation between the intent of the PSM II class and the PSM II assessment in application. They cater to slightly different aspects.
The class is broader, focusing on improving your skills and capabilities as a Scrum Master, while the assessment evaluates your knowledge as part of the story. 📚
Advanced Scrum Master Class
A crucial differentiator is that the Advanced Scrum Master class emphasises facilitation and zeroes in on facilitation. It spotlights the Scrum Master as a professional and helps the Scrum Master evolve beyond being just an admin for the team, which, unfortunately, happens quite often.
The class differentiates between having the title of Scrum Master and fulfilling the Scrum Master’s accountability as outlined in the Scrum Guide.
The real objective of the class is to delve into the Scrum Master’s accountability to the team, the Product Owner, and the organisation. 💼
This is the real heart of the class. 💖
While teaching and participating in the class, we employ facilitation techniques to help students understand these concepts, equipping them with the ability to use these techniques. 🧩
There’s real power in facilitation techniques.
Enriching the Learning Experience
In my version of the class, I use many liberating structures, connecting them to form a string that leads towards an overall story, shedding light on the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ of each exercise.
The idea is to enable you to harness these techniques with your teams and in your organisation. I try to explain the meta-process in the class as we go through each exercise, explaining the objective behind each one and the expected outcome. 💫
Now, wouldn’t that be a fantastic immersive version of the PSM II?
Wrapping Up
The intent is to help you apply these tools and techniques with your teams and organisation, enhancing your skills and capabilities as a Scrum Master. 🎯🔄
The class also provides a range of takeaway exercises, posters, cards, and exercise content for you to apply these learnings with your teams.
As we move towards a more immersive learning model, the idea is to guide you on running these exercises and then have you try them out with your team, return and share your experiences, and learn from others. 🌟
For me, the PSM II course is entirely about fostering your skill and capability as a Scrum Master. 🎓📚
The course helps you understand the Scrum Master’s accountability better and arms you with tools and techniques to work with teams effectively. 💭
Interested in growing your skills as a Scrum Master? Check out my Agile and Scrum courses, or drop me a message.
Let’s develop your capability as a Scrum Master together! 🌟
Question is, is the PSM 2 course or PSME right an advanced Scrum Master class validation of your skills or does it develop your skills and capability as a Scrum Master?
And I think it’s the latter, right? If you’re coming to a PSM, an advanced Scrum Master class and you’re just validating your skills, go take the assessment and don’t bother with the class, right? That’s the way I would think about it.
And I feel that there’s actually not in implementation, there’s actually not that much relationship between the intent of the PSM, the advanced Scrum Master class and the intent of the PSM2 assessment, right? They’re slightly different things.
And I think the class is much broader in that it’s designed to develop your skill and capability as a Scrum Master, whereas the assessment is just assessing the knowledge part of that story.
A key differentiator is that the advanced Scrum Master class focuses on facilitation. It focuses on the Scrum Master being a professional Scrum Master rather than just an admin for the team, which often happens, right? It focuses on that difference between being given the job title of Scrum Master and fulfilling the accountability of the Scrum Master that it talks about in the Scrum Guide.
That’s the real purpose of the class with a whole bunch of the way it kind of does it. That’s the story of the class, right? And then we’re going to talk about not just that part but what is the Scrum Master’s accountability to the team, what’s the Scrum Master’s accountability to the Product Owner, what’s the Scrum Master’s accountability to the organisation, right? That’s the story of the class.
But in teaching the class and participating in the class, we’re using facilitation techniques to help the students understand those things. That also teaches them how to use those facilitation techniques.
The way I teach the class, I use a lot of liberating structures in the class. I use a lot of strings of liberating structures, so liberating structures connected together to get to a kind of longer outcome. So a bunch of exercises that go towards an overall story.
And I try and explain the meta process in the class as we’re going through, like what is the exercise that we’re doing, why are we doing it, what’s the outcome that I’m trying to achieve? And then we’ve actually done the exercise, you’ve experienced that. How could you leverage that as a tool to use with your students as well, or not your students, your Scrum Master, your teams, your organisation, the people that you’re going to be working with?
So learning those facilitation techniques, learning to leverage liberating structures is for me a huge part of that class. It’s not the only part, right? Because there’s also the story of the class.
But then there’s the techniques that we use to get there. So for me, that class is almost entirely about the skill and capability of you as a Scrum Master, both from the perspective of how do I become a better Scrum Master and understand the Scrum Master accountability more, but also that meta process of what are the tools and techniques that I can use to do those things with teams.
Included in the class is a whole bunch of effectively take away exercises. We have posters, we have cards, we have exercise content that we provide you at the end of the class that you can then go do some of those exercises with your teams.
And in fact, I can imagine as we move towards a more immersive learning model that what we’ll do with some of those exercises is, you know, we’ll teach you how to run the exercise and then we’ll send you off as a Scrum Master to go run that exercise next week with your team. And then you come back the week after and tell us how you got on, what were the difficulties you hit, how could you have run it better, what did you learn, share that with everybody, and then we’ll talk about the next bit, teach the next exercise, and then you go off and use it with your team.
And that would be the immersive version of the PSM2, which I think would be fantastic.
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