32 Certificates Later, Everything We Thought We Knew about Scrum Was False
Over the 250,000 hours, we’ve seen it all when it comes to Agile development. Our takeaway? Agile is being outright murdered on a massive scale in the software industry. The amount of potential value lost by misunderstanding Agile just boggles the mind.
tl;dr: 32 new Professional Scrum certificates since January 2023.
We faced two options:
Gloom and doom about it.
Do something about it.
Guess which one we chose? (Hint: We’re bad at glooming)
Mission → Action!
We’ve been studying hard, fixing stuff, throwing workshops, and exchanging words over the past 6 months. Many of us fell in love with the mission and, weirdly enough, wished for further accountability on our study goals.
We chose Scrum.org as our go-to certification authority — it has the most respected & thorough Scrum certifications out there. Hard’s good! (Admittedly, the absence of stupid renewal fees played a role, too.)
How has it been going, you ask? Just look at the pile of certificates we’ve hoarded so far:
7x PSD I (Professional Scrum Developer),
1x PSM III, 1x PSM II, 5x PSM I (Professional Scrum Master)
3x PAL I, 1x PAL-EBM (Professional Agile Leadership / Evidence-Based Management)
1x SPS (Scaled Professional Scrum)
1x PSK I (Professional Scrum with Kanban)
1x PSU I (Professional Scrum with User Experience)
“So what?”
You don’t care about some pieces of certified paper. Yeah, neither would we. Let us explain.
Getting Scrum right is much more difficult than meets the eye. Done properly, however, it provides our clients (you) with an opportunity to get the best possible product value for the money invested, de-risking the journey.
And Scrum.org’s certificates are widely-recognized, difficult, and, most importantly, practice-oriented. It’s the perfect supplemental proof of Agile capabilities.
That’s why we do it.
7 New Professional Scrum Developers and Their Thoughts
At first, we thought we’d only have certified Scrum Masters and Product Owners but no Developers. That would have been embarrassing.
We were wrong, of course. Here are some certificate tips from our Panaxean Professional Scrum Developers:
“I’ve been a developer for 20 years now, but I gotta admit, even an old dog can learn some new tricks!”
“Don’t underestimate the test just because you’ve got experience. Yes, you may pass, but it won’t be without gallons of sweat. Study.” 😉
“The test is much harder than the practice assessments, which gives me assurance that I’ve actually learned stuff and the piece of paper I got with it is not useless.”
“The internet is full of outdated information from before 2020. Be careful and check the learning paths. My only fear during the test was that I’d have to go use the restroom.”
Only 0.2% of Scrum Masters reach PSM III
We’ve got one of them. Our in-house Scrum guru, Adam, has finally become an official Scrum guru.
His preparation tips:
Do other Scrum certificates prior to this. If I hadn’t done the 10 others before, it would’ve been impossible. Your knowledge needs to be much broader than Scrum alone.
It takes hundreds of study hours, and tons of experience, no kidding.
Talk to other PMs and put real-life scenarios into model examples. Experiment with approaches.
Writing experience is critical. The questions are open-ended and address complex situations; you need to get your point across clearly and quickly.
The journey is once again more important than the destination. Your understanding must be deeper and broader; you must research, come up with, and think about dozens of real-life scenarios. Think about them in various contexts — not only Scrum. All your development, managerial, and other soft skills will come into play.
Scrum in Marketing?
You’ve heard that right. Zuzka, our marketing chieftain, decided to bring Scrum into non-tech. She became the certified Product Owner of our marketing! (Bet your knickers this blog post was in the backlog, too.)
Zuzka, moments after nailing PSPO I.
Here are her thoughts:
“I can better understand my role, accountability, and key skills that a Product Owner should have. I can already point out dozens of real-life scenarios that could have gone much better, had I learned these concepts earlier. I feel like I’m better equipped to handle situations like that now.
Oh, and methods like release planning, team productivity, or velocity are going to be very useful even in our non-technical field.”
4 Scrum certificates in 1 day!
This is Steve. He knows everything. We don’t Google stuff anymore; we just ask Steve. He works too much; his team has to regularly order him to go on holiday.
Steve is on a horse.
So, when he caught on to this Agile hype, he started studying. A month of rigorous training later, he cracked open a cold one, invoked all the 20+ of experience under his belt, and won’t you believe it… The madman somehow aced 4 certificates in one sitting.
A word of warning, don’t try this at home. One certificate is stressful enough. Preserve your mental health.
In Steve’s own words: “I’m tired now.”
Steve is on a horse.
What was that about un-sucking Agile again?
So, yeah, we’re certified to show you we can un-suck your Agile. But how exactly do we do that? All these people you’ve just read about, compile their tips into a newsletter every two weeks.
Subscribe, you’ll learn how. It’s not a PSM I, but at least it’s free.