Professional Scrum Master (PSM-1)

Developing People and Teams

Self-Organizing Teams:

A fundamental foundational element to Scrum; self organizing and empowered teams are the engine to delivering value. Practitioners need to understand what self organization is and how to apply it to their context. They should also understand how to incrementally introduce self organization, the practices that can help self-organization occur, and the measures that help one judge if a team is able to be empowered to self-organize.

Facilitation:

Making decisions, sharing ideas, and being transparent is easy to agree to, but in reality, it is hard to do. Facilitation is a set of practices that help support the collaboration, communication, and creativity of teams and individuals. The practitioner should understand the value of facilitation, and have a collection of techniques they can apply. They should also have experience applying them in different situations with varying levels of complexity.

Coaching and Mentoring:

A key aspect of servant leadership is the ability to coach and mentor the organization, the team, and the business. The objective of coaching and mentoring is to help people get better at their work, deliver more value, or resolve a conflict or problem. The practitioner should be able to coach as well as mentor. They should understand different formal  techniques and be able to apply those techniques in different complex situations.

Managing Products with Agility

Forecasting & Release Planning:

Complex problems and the application of an empirical process requires a specific way of planning, estimating, and forecasting. Practitioners should be able to apply agile forecasting and release planning techniques, and understand the value of different approaches. They should understand which approaches work better in different situations. They should also understand how releases should be planned while dealing with complexity, dependencies, and value creation.

Product Value:

The ultimate goal is to deliver value to the customer and stakeholders. But value is complex, made up of long-term and short-term impact, internal and external value, and indirect and direct value. The practitioner should be able to understand how to define value for context, and apply it to the work they and the team do. They should be able to manage others’ understanding of value and apply different techniques and practices for defining, communicating and measuring value. They should understand the connection between value and empirical process, and how value should be the driving factor of the Product Goal.

Product Backlog Management:

The Product Backlog is a key artifact within Scrum. It is an ordered list that describes what is needed in the product. The Product Backlog provides transparency into what is happening to the product for the team, organization, and stakeholders. The practitioner should be able to describe what a Product Backlog is and apply a variety of techniques for managing the backlog. They should also understand how to make the Product Backlog transparent and how to manage stakeholder expectations associated with the backlog.

Stakeholders & Customers:

Effectively working with stakeholders and customers is a key skill for everyone on the Scrum Team. Scrum changes the nature of the interactions, encouraging more frequent collaboration and more open dialogue. The practitioner will understand the implication moving to an Agile approach will have to their stakeholders and customers and also become familiar with practices and stances that will help them work and collaborate in a more agile way.