How I passed PSMIII — and some tips
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As a Scrum Master I want to understand what it is supposed to mean to be a ‘Master’ of Scrum and what this role entails. I have invested a lot of time and effort in this. Here’s an account of this journey.
Many interpretations of Scrum
What struck me when I started my Scrum journey is that many people had different interpretations about Scrum. These went all over the place, like:
Scrum as means to do the development phase during traditional projects;
Assuming that with Scrum you can’t plan;
Scrum as a framework that’s un-Agile;
Assuming that certain practices as story points estimating and standing up during the daily are part of Scrum;
Scrum as the better alternative for waterfall projects.
It was very confusing. I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
My a-ha moment
My a-ha moment was at a Scrum.org Scrum Master class from Jesse Houwing. It was there that I realised that Scrum is all about delivering products of value working in a complex environment using empiricism: transparency, inspection, adaptation. It’s not about velocity, it’s not about having meetings for the sake of meeting. The artifacts, roles, events serve empiricism.
Scrum started making sense to me. And the discussions with the Agile Coaches that served our company and with my fellow Scrum enthusiast colleagues helped to reach a new level of understanding.
Writing and Serious Scrum
It was around this time that I started to become more and more annoyed by all the nonsense that is being said about Scrum. It triggered me to write articles about it and I was happy that those were being noticed. One of the people who did was Sjoerd Nijland and he asked me to team up as ‘Serious Scrum’. Serious Scrum grew and the discussions about Scrum, reviewing co-editor’s articles and writing articles myself all brought me more in-depth Scrum knowledge.
Road to PSMIII
The most important help to raise my awareness was proof-reading Sjoerd’s Road to PSMIII, a brilliant series that uncovers a lot of what Scrum is about. If there’s one series I recommend anyone to read as a preparation for PSMIII, it’s Road to PSMIII.
‘Are you Serious’ and ‘Scrum History’
What also helped to raise my knowledge greatly was addressing common misconceptions about Scrum in my series ‘Are You Serious?’. Very often I had too deep-dive into the Scrum Guide to find the answers to common Scrum questions. For a bunch of the ‘Are You Serious?’ articles I had help from Scrum experts, either by having a great discussion or by them giving me a great insight that didn’t occur to me before.
Another series that helped me raise my understanding is ‘Scrum History’. By looking at when and why Scrum came to light and how it evolved, I learned a lot about what Scrum is really about.
My working environment
As a Scrum Master for three teams I constantly have had to deal with all kinds of situations. On top of that I have constantly been helping the organisation understand what Scrum is about and why it is a great framework for our needs. This first hand experience as a Scrum Master also proved to be vital as a preparation for PSMIII.
The assessment
I approached the PSMIII assessment as a learning experience, learning by doing the assessment. I wanted to understand what kind of questions I could expect, how to answer the questions and how I would do time-wise. To be prepared for the real assessment, the second try. I didn’t specifically prepare for it. I figured that being a Scrum Master, discussing Scrum constantly, writing and proof-reading articles almost daily should be a good basis.
I made sure to have the most important characteristics of Scrum at hand and that I did have a quiet room with a perfect internet connection available for 3 hours.
The assessment had 8 multiple choice questions that appeared to be relatively easy. It also had 25 open questions. Some of them were obvious, others were very tough. I skipped 2 of the tough questions to not interrupt my flow. Getting back to those skipped questions was a nightmare with only 8 minutes on the clock. I had to basically crank out answers without really thinking it through, just to have something on paper. In the end I had one minute to spare.
I learned that many of my answers were too elaborate. By writing long-winded answers I almost had no time left at the end, surely not enough to revisit the answers.
Assessment Result
After hitting the ‘submit’ button I received an e-mail with an very low intermediate score. I was warned it would be low, as it only reflected the portion of the multiple choice questions. But it was even lower than I expected (12,2%). The mail also said that I had to wait for up to two weeks for the final results.
The results came after 5 days only and I was happily surprised that I passed. The mail that included the results also gave me insights on where I could improve my answers. It had so many suggestions that I wondered how I could have passed the assessment.
Here is a portion of the feedback:
Keep your answers simple and don’t overthink the questions;
Stick to Scrum Guide terminology. As an example: I once used different words than transparency, inspection and adaptation to describe the pillars of empiricism;
If you need to answer a question about how a Scrum Master should respond to a situation, think core Scrum theory;
Self-organisation is the key to many answers;
A Scrum Master doesn’t help the team by solving issues that they can solve themselves;
A Scrum Master should guide people to respond to situations using transparency, inspection and adaptation;
A Scrum Master sometimes should do more than merely advise. An example where more is requested from a Scrum Master is with lengthy conflicts disturbing the team.
Now it’s up to you!
As you can see I didn’t follow a standard route to PSMIII. But I believe there’s no standard route anyway. We all have our strengths and weaknesses and it’s key to understand what works for you to address these.
I expected to be ready for a first assessment after:
Being a Scrum Master for multiple teams in a challenging environment for a number of years;
Writing about Scrum;
Reading articles and books about Scrum and other approaches. I read all the articles from Serious Scrum, the bulk of the articles from The Liberators Christiaan Verwijs and Barry Overeem, The Scrum Pocket Guide from Gunther Verheyen, Mike Cohn’s blog and many others;
Discussing Scrum — both at Serious Scrum and at my company — with peers and stakeholders.
Another tip: always go back to the essence of Scrum:
Make a mental note that Scrum is a framework to address complex adaptive problems, delivering products of the highest possible value;
It’s all about empiricism: transparency, inspection, adaptation;
Scrum Teams / Development Teams are self-organising;
Scrum Teams / Development Teams are cross-functional, so no-one tells them how to how to create the Increment.
Here’s an article that emphasises the essence of Scrum:
Heart of Agile uncovers the essence of Scrum
Heart of Agile emphasises what Agile/Scrum are all aboutmedium.com
And this is the best article I know to prepare for the PSMIII assessment (just remember that we all have our unique path):
Road to Mastery
Road to PSM III — Episode 21 — Final episodemedium.com
Good luck with your own PSMIII journey. Get ready to learn a lot! Because this is the essence of the assessment, to have a confirmation that you have your act together about Scrum. And to understand what can be improved.