7 key things I learnt from my Scrum Master Certification Course

I recently complete the Scrum Master Certification course with The Knowledge Academy ( theknowledgeacademy ).

What is it about? And more importantly, what did I learn?

Here is the 7 min summary for you, of the 7 key things that I learned from this 16-hour online course.

First, what is a Scrum Master anyway?

A scrum master is a high-level practitioner of the Scrum model of Agile project management. Scrum can be considered a subset of agile methodology, along with others like Lean, etc.

Scrum borrows some of the basic principles of Agile, yet Scrum is quite unique and has it's own characteristics.

The Scrum master (SM) is the person that supports the entire Scrum team to carry out the short project "sprints" in proper alignment with the Scrum approach.?Sprints, as their name suggests, are short, fixed-time projects where the scrum team develops an imperfect but working product ready for evaluation by the stakeholders. Normally a sprint lasts 2 weeks.

But, contrary to their name, the SM do not call the shots and instead they act like the "servant leader" of the team, supporting and coordinating everyone from behind. When there is great communication in a scrum team between product owners (decision maker) and development team, and the scrum team is working productively, that's when you know a SM has done well.

To be a SM requires the highest knowledge and experience of scrum, exceptional communication skills to handle and guide stakeholders and team members alike who may not be so familiar with scrum, and superb emotional intelligence along with the humility to be a servant leader and lead not by authority but lead by supporting all members in a diverse scrum team.

Sounds pretty difficult right? It is! That's why excellent SMs are rare, and highly desired by software development companies in particular who often practice Scrum.

Now that you know what it is about, what did I learn?

Here are the 7 key things that I learned that I felt were the most impactful and useful and that can be applied to any project team or working team in any industry

1. Scrum Theory: Incremental, Iterative, Empirical

• Incremental - breaking the project into bite-sized parts or "sprints".
• Iterative - developing on a constant basis. Every time you go through an iteration, you're feeding back what you've learned so we don't repeat the same mistakes again.
• Empirical - experimental in nature. In a controlled environment, have a go and see what you can come up with, see what you can learn.

2. Timeboxing Concept

• Duration is fixed and cannot be extended (hard stop).
• Focus on creating an Imperfect but working product for review.

3. Product Owner as final decision maker and the only one that can give instructions to Development Team

• Single person will represent the various stakeholders' and customers' voices and take responsibility for the project direction, as well as the outcomes. Their main task is managing the Product backlog (list of work to be done).
• Because there is only one person who can give instructions to the Development Team, the risk of "scope creep" or "top-down" directives can be well managed.

4. MoSCoW prioritisation technique

• Must have - essential and vital features/parts, considered the minimum viable product (MVP).
• Should have - important features/parts but not considered vital.
• Could have - low value or low impact features/parts with low return on investment.
• Won't have - features/parts which are considered as no longer part of the project scope.

5. Daily Scrum/Daily Standup

• a daily 15-minute timeboxed meeting, usually done in front of a team/kanban board, to go through the work plan for the next 24hrs of the sprint.
• roadblocks can be identified, discussed and overcome.
• often a "burndown chart" can be used to show the amount of work that has been completed and the total work remaining in a sprint, plotted against the sprint time.

6. Sprint Review and retrospective?

• Review - also known as a "show-and-tell" where the whole scrum team along with selected stakeholders such as potential customers are invited. The team explains what has been done, and also demonstrate the product features/parts that has been completed to the stakeholders for their feedback. It is usually timeboxed to 1hr of time per weeks of sprint.
• Retrospective - only the scrum team gathers to reflect on how the work was done, the working relationships among team members, what was good and what was not good. Then the team reviews and summarises the lessons learnt and discuss how things could be improved for the next sprint. It is usually timeboxed to 3 hours.

7. Minimum viable product (MVP) vs. Minimum Marketable Product (MMP)

• if the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), which only just includes the "Must-have" requirements, was delivered to the customer, they would not be happy, and it would not meet their expectations.
• So, the Minimum Marketable Product (MMP) is a step above the MVP, and it includes the "Must-haves" and some "Should-haves", with enough value provided to the customer to be commercially successful in the market.

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And here is my certificate!