What I learned taking the PSM Scrum Master Level II course
After a busy year working with my teams at Babylon Health, I took the opportunity to take the Professional Scrum Master Level II course from scrum.org just before the Christmas break.
Back in 2016, I took the PSM Scrum Master Level I course, just weeks into joining Accenture as a new graduate. It changed the direction of my whole career. My experience of the course led me to pursue my current career path of agile delivery. I saw the opportunity to be involved in building great products as a member of a scrum team.
After four years of Scrum master experience in a range of companies, it felt the right time to return to the theory and complete the scrum.org PSM Level II course and qualification. I chose the agility.im course run by Paul Grew remotely.
What is the PSM Level II course? Whilst the PSM Level I course focussed on teaching a solid foundational understanding of the Scrum Framework, the PSM Level II course focusses on the application of this theory in real life situations. It connects through examples how in real-life situations the Scrum framework should be applied. This provides a much more practical examination of the framework than the previous qualification. Connecting theory and reality is always the challenge, and something I needed to revisit after a few years working with teams.
It was particularly useful given the recent release of the 2020 updated Scrum Guide.
The course is structured around the Scrum Master’s services to the development team, product owner and the organisation as a whole. In particular, the PSM II course puts emphasis on the anti-patterns of bad scrum teams, and how to remedy them. Inevitably a number of my teams had anti-patterns, and the course gave me an opportunity to inspect them away from the day-to-day, and develop an action plan to resolve these issues.
It was valuable to have the time and space to step away from my current role, where delivery of specific projects is usually the number one priority, and think about the process that can help the teams work more effectively in greater detail. The course also brought together a range of Scrum Masters with different experiences, with some useful sharing of tips and tricks to help resolve issues.
From a remote perspective, using MURAL and Zoom led to an almost flawless experience. The only challenge was continued concentration on the course material over two days, although the number of interactive discussions and breaks provided by Paul helped with this.
In future, I think the course could be improved by spending more time at the beginning getting some context on everyone (including the trainer’s) Scrum experience and their current issues, which may have helped the discussions at a later point.
Overall, I would recommend this course to Scrum Masters who have been working with Scrum teams for 1–5 years and have developed a good understanding of Scrum in practice, but need to reconnect with the theory. With less experience than a year, I do not believe it’s useful due to the lack of real life context. For experienced Scrum Masters, a thoroughly recommended course to sharpen your application of the Scrum framework.
