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What will you learn on the professional scrum master course?

Discover how the Professional Scrum Master course empowers you to lead agile teams, fostering autonomy and collaboration for optimal success.

Published on 19 January 2023

Written by Martin Hinshelwood

5 minute read

https://nkdagility.com/resources/zqwHUwnw0hg

What will you learn on the professional scrum master course?

The Professional Scrum Master (PSM) course has a large degree of theory relating to scrum than something like the Applying Professional Scrum (APS) course.

It focuses a great deal on the theory of being a scrum master in a scrum team environment.

Learning from live scrum environments

It’s also a great course from a learning, real-time about the challenges of a scrum master because each class contains wannabe scrum masters, newbie scrum masters, and experienced scrum masters talking about the role, the challenges, and what they would like to learn from the experience.

Your Professional Scrum Trainer is answering questions, in a how to context, from existing scrum masters and it provides newbie and wannabe scrum masters great insights into the role.

How does scrum work?
How can a scrum master interact and engage with teams more effectively?
How to overcome common challenges experienced by scrum masters?

And so forth.

Learning what the ramifications of a scrum master role are.

Ultimately, you are learning what the ramifications of a scrum master role are.

A lot of people have an idea that a scrum master role is limited exclusively to working with a single scrum team, and there are a lot of reasons why people hold those beliefs, but the role includes a great deal more than being a facilitator of scrum in a team environment.

There are 3 parts to the scrum master role:

Scrum master’s in service to the developers.
Scrum master’s in service to the product owner.
Scrum master’s in service to the organization

A scrum master needs to focus on all three of those elements to be effective in the role because all of those elements impact the team’s ability to create and deliver value throughout the customer journey.

Example

There is no point in having a great working relationship with the developers and creating a strong team environment without the team being able to deliver a valuable product to a customer. If they are working out of alignment with organizational capabilities and objectives, there is very little value being generated for the organization.

There must be alignment between the organizational and customer objectives, in the context of the scrum team environment, for value to be created, captured, or delivered.

A scrum master is not directly accountable for the quality of the product, not directly accountable for the value being created, but they are directly accountable to creating the environment that determines how EFFECTIVE the scrum team is in creating value for the customer and organization.

That is something that the Professional Scrum Master course focuses a great deal on teaching.

Foundations in Empiricism.

Empiricism, also known as Empirical Process Control, is an essential process in helping individuals and team navigate uncertainty and complexity.

The pillars of empiricism are Transparency. Inspection. Adaptation.

It is essential that a scrum master understands what empiricism is, why it is such a critical element of both agile and scrum, and how it serves to help teams solve complex problems and create complex solutions, despite uncertainty and complexity in the environments they serve.

The Professional Scrum Master course ensures that a scrum master has a strong, foundational knowledge of empiricism and understands the context of empiricism in product development and value creation throughout the value stream.

Working Increments in each Sprint

Scrum is built on the core concept of delivering a working, valuable product increment at the end of each sprint. The idea that the customer gets something of value within short, rapid cycles of product development.

The Professional Scrum Master course promotes the value of working, useable product increments such as features and helps the scrum master understand why this is such a core tenet of Scrum.

This draws on the agile manifesto ’s second value, working software over comprehensive documentation, and provides a context from which the scrum master can understand what the primary goal of each sprint is and why that is true.

If you don’t have a working increment at the end of each sprint:

You aren’t able to get feedback from customers.
You aren’t able to mitigate risk.
You don’t have data to inform what you should focus on next.
You haven’t created value for customers.

And so forth.

Summary of the Professional Scrum Master course.

The PSM course focuses on helping the scrum master understand.

What a scrum master is supposed to do within a scrum team.
What their primary role and responsibilities are within a scrum team.
What theory underpins Scrum and why that is critical to success for a scrum team.
How a scrum master is meant to interact with teams.
How a scrum master is meant to deal with the organization.
How a scrum master is meant to deal with individuals outside of the scrum team.
How to be effective, on a daily basis, within a scrum team environment.

Each Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) brings their own experience, knowledge, and expertise related to working with scrum masters and uses war stories, strong examples, and case studies to demonstrate a point.

They leverage that knowledge and experience to answer questions from course delegates in a way that gives them practical and actionable insights into how they can improve as a scrum master, and how they can solve the problems within their environment.

Following the scrum guide doesn’t solve every problem.

Sometimes, you just need someone that has been there before and knows how to help teams become effective despite adversity and complexity. A great Professional Scrum Trainer does exactly that. They provide context and real-world examples of how to succeed as a scrum master.

About NKD Agility

Naked Agility is an #agile consultancy that specializes in #scrumtraining, #agilecoaching and #agileconsulting to help teams evolve, integrate, and continuously improve.

We recognize the positive impact that a happy AND inspired workforce can have on customer experience, and we actively help organizations to tap into the power of creative, collaborative, and high-performing teams that is unique to #agile and #scrum environments.

If you are interested in #agiletraining, visit https://nkdagility.com/training/

If you have identified the need for #agilecoaching and #agileconsulting, visit https://nkdagility.com/agile-consulting-coaching/

We would love to work with you.

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So what would you learn on the professional scrum Master class? Yeah, that’s a great class as well.

Um, so it there’s a lot of theory in that class. Um, so the actual material for the class is very theory based, whereas the APS ditches some of the theory in order to have the practical experience.

Uh, the PSMF focuses very much on the theory and being a scrum master, so there’s lots of exercises where you have these people who are W to be perspective or currently are scrum Masters in organisations, um, discussing and figuring out how things work and go together, um, and how they can interact with teams better.

So ultimately, I think what you learn is what are the ramifications of the scrum Master role, right? Um, so a lot of people have a vision of the scrum Master role that it is the scrum Master accountability, um, that it is just focused on a team, right?

Um, and there’s reasons why people kind of have that blinkered focus on the team, uh, but really there’s three parts to the scrum Master role. There’s the scrum Master service to the team, the scrum Master’s service to the product owner, product management, right?

And the scrum Master service to the organisation, and they need to be able to focus at all of those levels in order to be effective, ‘cause all of those things affect the ability of the team to deliver value and deliver usable working product, right?

There’s no point in the focusing just on the team and the team being awesome and fantastic at delivering. They’re doing continuous delivery, but they’re delivering nothing that’s useful to the customers.

So the scrum Master, while not directly accountable for the value or directly accountable for the quality, is directly accountable for them being effective at what it is that they’re doing.

And that’s what we try and get across in the PSM, um, along with foundations in empiricism and the ultimate value of usable working increments of work on a regular cadence.

CU, if you don’t have a usable working increment, then you’re not able to get feedback, you’re not able to mitigate risk, right? Those are things that are so important in that story.

So the PSM is really hitting on, um, from a theory perspective, all of the basic capabilities of what is the scrum Master, what they’re supposed to be able to do on a day-to-day basis, um, how they’re supposed to interact with the organisation, opening up the scope of their work, um, and figuring that out.

But I think there’s really more to it than that, because each trainer brings their knowledge of working with organisations, of helping people who are scrum Masters deal with their problems in organisations.

So there’s a piece of the course which is the courseware and the theory, um, and then there’s also another piece of the course which is the trainers’ experience, right?

All of our trainers are not just trainers; they are also people who are coaches, consultants, um, in DevOps, in agile, in whatever it is that they’ve been doing for years, and they’re able to bring those experienced stories.

And I actually feel like there’s a third layer. There’s a third layer in there that is the meta conversation about how the trainer is running the class, and those are skills that the scrum Masters can also take on board to help them run the events that they’re doing in scrum, right?

So how do you run a daily standup effectively? How do you, um, have people organised together when you’ve got a larger group of people turn up? What happens if you get 70 people at the Sprint review, right?

Um, how do you make sure that you get information from all of them? And all of our trainers, they use it in different levels based on their taste, right?

So everybody’s different, um, but we have folks that use and talk about training from the back of the room, um, lots of liberating structures, right, in able to engage people.

And while we’re not explicitly teaching those things, we’re using those things to facilitate and run the class, which enables the more advanced scrum Masters in the room, right, who maybe aren’t the one-offs or maybe going to get the jobs, but the actual doing it just now to have an extra level of engagement, understanding, and learning that they can take from the class as well.

Agile Project Management Agile Frameworks Increment Empirical Process Control Professional Scrum Scrum Team Software Development Scrum Master People and Process Scrum Product Development

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