Scrum PSM I or the Art of Zen and Agile Frameworks

Scrum - a word that inspires rolled-eyes, zealotry, or blank faces depending on who you mention it to. At its core it is a framework to help teams work together to achieve goals.

To learn through experience, self-organise while working through a problem, and reflect on their wins (and losses) to improve - just to start the ‘cycle’ again. Some recent time off allowed me to reflect on some longer term goals, however I realised that I lacked a framework to handle larger personal projects, and was spending too much time trying to figure out everything before getting started.

Welcome to the agile philosophy.

It sounds ridiculous - but before reading into this I’d never had the conscious realisation that one can break a project into a goal, and work towards it in smaller usable increments versus your typical waterfall style of project management. I started simple, reading about kanban and implementing a Trello board for a big picture, long term goal tracker. I also helped my sibling set up a kanban board for their studies - something that’s been going well.

Kanban was working well for me to keep track of broader goals, but I found it wasn’t working well for me on a single project basis.

Enter Scrum.

First thing first was reading the scrum.org Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber & Jeff Sutherland.

This provided a great top-level view of Scrum, but left my practical understanding lacking. The next step was reading the Scrum Narrative and PSM Exam guide by Mohammed Musthafa Soukath Ali - this 169 page book was fantastic in deep diving both the framework, and validating knowledge with quizzes throughout each chapter.

After that, I spent some deep going through the scrum.org and Atlassian blog posts.Reading through pages, and pages I felt it was worthwhile validating my knowledge in a more meaningful way. scrum.org PSM I seemed like the best way to do that - studying at this point was relatively straightforward - re-reading the Scrum Guide and taking the scrum.org Open Assessments until I was confident.

With the exam passed, I felt more complimenting integrating aspects of Scrum into my personal projects. Distilling the values of the framework, and the framework itself into something immediately useful in my day-to-day.Besides - sometimes just seeing that certificate is nice.