Unlocking Agile Success: Your Guide to the Professional Scrum Foundations Class and PSM I Assessment

Hello my name’s Martin Intuit and today I’m going to be talking a little bit around the professional scrum foundations class and the PSM 1 assessment. Naked agility is available for DevOps and agile training and consulting. Contact us for a free consultation.

Ok so I have some things I want to cover. The two main things that I wanted to talk about unless we get some additional questions are the PSF class, how it works, what it’s all about and why you would want, why we want to do one, and the PSM 1 assessment which is the result of the PSF class. That is the assessment that you get at the end of that class.

So first off the professional scrum foundations class I think is one of my favorite classes to teach and we work together in teams. So I just finished a PSF with my good friend Russell and we taught at 20 people at one customer. So it was a private class and we broke those 20 people down into three teams. So with three teams working on the same backlog, so they all get given the same topic, the same backlog, but they pick a team mascot and that makes each of the things that they’re doing a little bit different. But they’re effectively all working from the same backlog and they actually build software in the class.

And I guess the crazy thing about the PSF is they actually build software in the class and I love that they do that. I’ve taught this class in Ghana for the Ghana police service, sorry, look on the police force and I had police officers, lighting police officers building software in the class that had never built software before. We do something super simple and we don’t take technology and we help people out if they’re struggling. But the idea is you’re being creative, you’re building something new and interesting.

I think if I was teaching the police officers again I would probably use something like the scrum tail board game, something of that like where the activity, the creative activity that people are doing is to create a murder mystery novel and they do it in an iterative fashion. So I think that would be really interesting. But for this class I tend to always default to building software. My background is software engineering and it’s, I guess I maybe I’m a bit of a masochist. My favorite part of the course is when folks find out they’ve got to build software in the class and they have 30 minutes for their sprint length to build the software.

The sprints actually, the working part is 30 minutes. They have a 10 minute planning, 15 minute review which is split between the teams because there’s one review for all the teams and then 10 minute retrospective. You’re supposed to do four sprints and when I teach this in person I have managed to get through four sprints. But I think the most that I’ve ever done in the virtual setting is two sprints and I’m planning to do something iteratively, getting making the class better in the next sprint.

I’m gonna work with Russell next sprint, next class which is Monday Tuesday in Pacific time zone which is gonna be fun because I’m gonna be up late. At least Russell won’t be up early and I’m going to deliberately focus on just doing two sprints and see how I can change the dynamic in the class with that. We do a lot of really awesome exercises in the class apart from actually building software and we work a lot.

I actually have one of the PCs, one of the exercises that we do here. Let me, can I make myself a little, or just disappear, make myself disappear. There we go. This is the result of one of the longer exercises that we do and where we build out the students work together as a big group and in teams to come up with all of this information that’s on the board here.

So we talked about the three roles in scrum and their core accountabilities. What we’re trying to get to in this class is let’s make sure everybody has the basic solid, everybody knows what our product owner is supposed to be, what the intent of the product owner role is. So then when they go back to their organization they can look at what somebody is doing in that role and say, well that’s not enough, that’s not going to give us the benefit that we’re trying to achieve from this idea.

So we go through the three roles and our accountabilities and we also go through the three artifacts which is the pink things here and their transparency. So something that I’ve been using a lot is a transparent past, present and future for the artifacts so that you have complete transparency across the life of your project and that seems to, our product, that seems to work pretty well and has a good explanation for folks.

And then we go into the empirical nature of each of the events and the thing that I think folks find super surprising about this class is the number of things that they find out that they were doing or that they were told as part of scrum but is not actually part of scrum. And it’s something that people do and that’s okay. I’m absolutely fine with complementary practices that make things better for groups but don’t feel that you’re forced to do those things.

Scrum doesn’t talk about user stories, it doesn’t talk about burndowns, it doesn’t talk about velocity and it doesn’t talk about any of those things. It doesn’t talk about standing up during the daily scrum. These are all complimentary practices that organizations and teams may choose to use as part of their endeavour and it may work for them or they may want to choose something different in those practices.

So for example, what’s a good one in, you know when I ask myself these questions I really should have an answer prepared but this is office hours rather than the presentation. So I just wanted to show you some of these things that were working on. But having complementary practices like standing up, there’s a good one that some teams use. I have heard of teams in Norway that their daily plank instead of daily stand up and it might work for them. It doesn’t work for everybody. You don’t have to stand up. The purpose of the daily scrum is an inspect and adapt on the work you’ve done in the last 24 hours to plan or create an implementation plan for the next 24 hours.

That’s what it is. How you figure out how to do that inside of that 15 minute event, that’s up to you. We can make suggestions as coaches and trainers. We often make suggestions on how to fulfil that. You might in your daily scrum use the three questions: what did you do yesterday, what are you doing today and what are you, what’s blocking you? If you were focused on the individual you might focus on the sprint goal. What did you do yesterday that helped the team progress towards the sprint goal? You might ask that or you might use a practice where you’re looking at a board, a visualisation of the work that’s going on and you look at the piece of work and have a conversation about how that work is progressing and who’s been working on it and what’s been happening and telling that story that way.

So you can focus on the people, you can focus on the work, you can focus on the data. If you’re using the professional scrum with Kanban guide and adding those Kanban metrics, you’re probably going to be looking at work item aging during the daily scrum. You want to be looking at is something getting close to our service level expectation? You know we have an expectation that anything we take on, any piece of work we take on will flow through our process within a particular time period. If it’s starting to reach one of those boundaries then we want to have a deeper conversation about it. We want to talk about those things.

Other things maybe we don’t have to talk about, they’re just progressing fine. So this was a very useful exercise that we do. It takes quite a considerable amount of time but it allows us to focus on what the events are, walk that floor and answer the questions that people have. What I usually do is I give, we had three teams, so I gave each team a team, got the accountabilities, a team got the transparencies and a team got the empiricism. And somebody from the team had to say what the thing was, what’s supposed to happen in it and then we may be modified that a little bit or we added more to it.

And then as we added more to it people started asking questions. And because they’re asking questions there, then you know, doesn’t this, isn’t the scrum master the interface between the development team and the product owner? We can have a discussion about that and figure out that no way they’re not at the interface between the development team and the scrum master. So that was a very useful exercise and it’s part of a wider set of exercises that we use in the PSF and we had a lot of fun working through everything and figuring out what was going on.

So let me switch back. I would like you to feel free to ask any questions you would like. This is office hours, ask me anything. So I’m going to talk for a little while. I’m gonna hang out here if there were questions asked between the last office hours which was last Wednesday at 6:00 and this one this Wednesday at 6:00. And then feel free, are there not? Sorry, then I will be answering chat, anything, attempting to answer those questions and feel free to ask me any questions just now. I can see the chat or maybe I can see the chat for each of the platforms that I’m streaming to.

And obviously if you want to have, if you want to ask me a question but not have anybody know that you’ve asked me that question, there’s always this link here. If you go to Nicola doula T net forward slash ask and that is an anonymous question ask. You will just get a text box. Whatever you put in the text box is in danger of me reading out. So put in there what you want me to read out and then I will attempt to answer that question as much as I can.

As I said in my tweets about an hour ago, I’m happy to answer questions on any of the things that I deal with. I’m a professional scrum trainer with scrum dot org but I’m also a Microsoft MVP in DevOps. So I have both technical background. I was a software developer for ten years, I was a DevOps consultant for ten years and I’ve been a scrum trainer for ten years as well. So that experience of working with customers both in the US, I spent three years living in Seattle consulting there and in Europe where I’ve spent the last, whoa, seven years since 2013, who moved back from Seattle working across here as well.

So back to the PSF, I will, I just had a question that I had issues attempting to install the latest II do migrator. Do you mean the Azure DevOps migration tool? That unfortunately, I built, not unfortunately, it’s a pretty good tool. Yes, I can probably help you with that. I would not be able to get into the technical details in here but if you tweet me at Mr. Hench, I’ll happily help you out. And I haven’t heard of anybody else having any problems. That doesn’t mean there isn’t problems and I would need to check that out.

Somebody’s having a problem installing another, installing the Azure DevOps migration tools which I did build. So I can certainly help you out with that. Again here, tweet me and I will directly help you out. On my website there’s also a chat button and that will get directly to me and you can use your email.

Okay Jerry, no problem. Where was I? Yes, PSF. So I really enjoy that whole aspect to the PSF of level setting. Every, the class that I just finished teaching Monday Tuesday was the third set of twenty people in the same company and we have three more classes scheduled now. So we’re going to have a total of a hundred and twenty people going through this exercise, build up that level of knowledge inside of the organization and try and get to a little bit of a tipping point. If enough people understand the way things could be, and I’m saying could be rather than supposed to be, but could be, that they could get some benefit by jumping in there, then we can get to enough people, we can make that change in, maybe try and get it to stick inside the organization.

So training and training everybody is really important. The organizations where I’ve seen they’ve had the best and biggest impact from this type of thing have trained a very large majority of the people in the organization. I did training in Utah for a company and we trained everybody in the organization from the CEO all the way down to the software engineers and the guy driving the forklift in the warehouse. And that really helped set that idea of how people should expect to interact with software, how they should expect to interact in that software development world.

And even the guy who drives a forklift in the warehouse had an iPad attached to his forklift and he had to interface with the software. So one of the things he learned going through the class was how to engage with the software team, how to understand why they might not be doing everything you want them to do because they have other priorities, why you don’t want to be interrupting them all the time and changing what they work on. But also that he now felt empowered to give feedback. It’s expected that you give feedback and we as a software engineering team want your feedback. And that was a very powerful story for them.

So the PSF again is a very powerful class. It’s really the 101 and I want to start up doing scrum as one reason to use it. And another one that I’ve done quite often with organizations is the, we already know scrum, we’ve been doing it for a little while, we’ve picked up some bad habits and maybe we need to level set again. So I’ve actually taught the PSF more than once for the same group of people but with a large time span in between, maybe a couple of years. And that level set really helped solidify some of those ideas for that team.

Cool, so I have completed that class. I have a catch up with that team in two weeks and one of the reasons that I schedule a catch up with that group of people and after two weeks I call it a reify event. It’s just an error but it gives them a chance to ask me any questions that they come up with and have an actual moment when they can do that, when they can get on our live call with me and do that. I’m quite happy always and if you were in one of my classes, I’m quite happy always to engage with those times. I’m always happy to answer questions, that’s why I do this session as well.

But the PSM 1 assessment is what comes out of taking the PSF. That’s the basic scrum knowledge assessment from scrum dot org and it’s included in the PSM, what PSF class as well as the PSM class. And one of the things that scrum dot org has found is that if you, if people that go through the class take the assessment, they’re more likely, statistically more likely to pass if they take it within 14 days. So they want to encourage people to take it within 14 days.

So even though you know the token you get to take the assessment has an unlimited timeframe, if you take the assessment within 14 days and unfortunately fail, if you don’t meet the grade, then you will get automatically sent a second token to take the assessment but only if you take it within 14 days. So that encourages people to just take it, you know, even if you don’t think you’re ready, take it within that 14-day time period because then you get a second attempt anyway and you learn something by taking that assessment.

The first thing you learn is about your knowledge level. The assessment has a number of different sections and each of them are scored independently and you will see in your response at which areas you did well in and which areas you didn’t do so well in and it will provide links and not only to content but the learning path that there is for scrum masters as well for the PSM 1. So that’s a pretty handy tool for you as students. Just take the assessment, it’s really that simple. Just take it and take it within 14 days so you get a second attempt in case you could just, oh I missed one question or I misread it.

That could have been your failing percentage, that’s not really fair. Whereas if you get a second attempt, maybe that will help you out and solve that little problem which is pretty good. And so if you’re prepping for the PSM 1 assessment and I send out some data to students at the end of the class, it’s something that I try and send out the same day of the class. So if you’ve been through a class for me, you should have it already. But I send out a link to the scrum master learning path which is a website provided by scrum dot org and it has a number of different areas that you can dive into.

So for example, one of my favourites, done understanding and applying done. You can see that there’s a number of different blog posts available. So these ones are our blog posts, you can get additional content. Obviously reading the scrum guide, go look at the scrum framework. I’m pretty sure that will pop open the poster or at least let you download it, massive. You can get in print that out, massive. And additional things that can get you going.

And if you’re logged in to the website, which I am, you can go tick things off and it will remember things that you’ve done, things that you’ve read so that you can get a better understanding of those things. And that’s a pretty handy tool and I like that one and it works well enough. I’m not saying it’s amazing yet but scrum dot org are iterating on that learning path, adding more content as it becomes available and potentially asking trainers to write additional content.

So that’s working pretty well. And then there’s some links I send around for days, I, Joel, the agile manifesto, a list of the agile principles, while your privacy’s, that kind of thing. But fundamentally reading the scrum guide is probably the most important thing to go read and having a good understanding of empiricism. Scrum is really just an empirical process control system. So if you understand what is trying to be achieved with an empirical process control system, you can better understand scrum and then better understand implementing it and better understand how to engage with people inside of your organization to help them understand as well.

There’s also a scrum open assessment. I’m pretty sure, let me, ah, there are open assessments for a number of the different classes. There’s a scrum open, product owner open, development open, Kanban, nexus, leadership and measurement open. That actually might be a cool thing to do in a live session would be answer some of those questions. That would be certainly a little bit interesting.

But those things, looking at the mindsets and practices of scrum, the learning path, reading the scrum guide, going through the material, I PDF the slides that we used as well as all of the mural content that tool that you saw with the diagram that we built was built in mural with the students. I PDF all of that and provide it to the students at the end of the class so that they can review that as well.

Yeah, that’s really that PSF and PSM 1 in a nutshell. So the next class I’m doing is the PSF on Monday which again is another private class but I also have scheduled a couple of public classes as well. They’re in the GMT, at GMT, they’re in the UTC plus one British summer time at time zone. You’ll find them on my website. You can either click class schedule and but you can see they’re rotating around here anyway.

And I’ve actually done something that I would be good to know from you if it is useful but I’ve put the UTC plus one in the title so that when it goes round these rotations or it appears in Google, you should be able to see which time zone the classes are. And now we’ve all moved to virtual, it’s a little bit more difficult to see how that works.

So I’ve put up, let me pop over here at two classes and I put up my, they’re both professional agile leadership classes. I’m running them in the Edinburgh timezone if that helps as well. The one on the fourth of June is going to be a standard today class and however the one on the 29th of June I’m going to experiment with a four-day class. It will be four half days that might be better for some folks in the leadership role and we’re actually gonna start early. So it’s gonna be eight till 11:30 I think, so you’re done before lunch. You can even, you know, start checking your emails before lunch and you’ve got the whole afternoon to get everything else organised.

I would also be interested in feedback on that as well. So hopefully that will be useful this session and I usually do, depending on the amount of content in questions that I’ve got, I might do an hour or I might do half an hour. We’re coming up on the half hour and I have answered the only question that I’ve had there and we’ve talked about the PSF. So I’m wondering if there’s not going to be any other questions.

I can hear myself somewhere, hold on, I’ve got technical difficulties. Oh, I’m a bit of a silly. I opened up YouTube and I started playing this video live watching it. It was just a little bit behind. Nevermind, there is that. And I also have on my YouTube channel, you should be able to see I have, I was going to be talking at an event. I was going to be talking at the Tech Arama event in Belgium. That’s in, was in two weeks.

Which I guess is the tenth. I think it’s the tenth or maybe it’s the sixth. No, oh, third, third next Wednesday. Ahaha, so next Wednesday what I’m going to do is I’m going to do the session live that I was going to do anyway at the conference, being that the conference has been cancelled. They’re not doing the sessions online, they’re just doing a bunch of workshops.

So I would encourage you to go look at the Tech Arama website and see what workshops they’re running there. Could be something super interesting in there. Do they have a number of workshops? But I’m going to be talking about live site culture and site reliability engineering from the Azure DevOps team at Microsoft and I’m going to talk about that next Wednesday during the day about 2:00 p.m. British summer time.

So if that is everything, I am super glad that you managed to view some of this and I got a question answered. So I hope that this was useful and if you have any additional questions please make sure you ask anonymously here and or put it in the comments for any of the streaming platforms and I will be notified. I’ll get a question and I will answer it next Wednesday at 6 p.m. UTC plus one.

Okay, so thank you very much. Naked agility is available for DevOps and agile training and consulting. Contact us for a free consultation.