In this article, we are going to talk about the Certified Scrum Master Training. But let’s first see what is Agile. Agile refers to the software development methodologies and practices which revolve around the idea of iterative and incremental development cycles. These methodologies and practices requirements and solutions develop through collaboration between multi-functional, self-organizing teams. The ultimate value in rapid development is that it enables teams to deliver value faster. At the same time, delivers greater quality and predictability, and a greater ability to respond to change. Generally, Scrum and Kanban are two of the most commonly used Agile methodologies. It represents a leadership philosophy that encourages teamwork. In addition to self-regulation and accountability, a set of engineering best practices intended to allow for the rapid delivery of high-quality programs as well as, a business approach that balances development with Customer needs and company goals.
A group of fourteen leading software industry professionals developed the manifesto that reflects their experience regarding approaches that work and do not work in software development. Agile is a monotone approach to presenting software in an incremental manner from the project beginning rather than delivering the entire project at the end. Furthermore, if the project is exemplary, then the Agile Project Management methodology is the best approach to follow. The agile methodology primarily aims at getting the product to the customer in smaller sprints rather than a one-time delivery. As a result, it is easy for the customer to test the unit delivered to the project and make sure that proper quality is maintained. Thus, Agile methodologies grow rapidly across different industries and applications. Hence, its importance grew far beyond the software industry and became the to go practice book for a big portion of project practices.
Our Free Agile Scrum Training describes the Agile and Scrum foundations and different Agile and Scrum Certification options in detail. Enroll in our Free Agile Training now.
The importance of Agile project management
The Project Management Institute has performed a job analysis in developing the certification in line with the industry’s better Practices. The result of this analysis provides the importance level of every single tool, task, and technique in addition to the needed knowledge as well as skills to adopt Agile core concepts and principles.
Thus, PMI created PMI-ACP practices and sponsored its associated PMI-ACP Certification. You can obtain it after successfully passing the PMI-ACP exam. This exam is a vital part of the activities that lead to obtaining the certification. Therefore it is necessary to reflect the exam accurately implement agile practices, tools, and techniques used by project management practitioners. This certification is designed to demonstrate to employers the practitioner’s level of professionalism in the agile practices of project management. It also increases the practitioner’s professionalism in both project management tools and techniques.
This is just an example of one of the well known agile practices and certifications. On the other hand, there are a large number of successful agile practices out there. Thus, you would need to do your research before deciding which practice or methodology you would adopt. You should also decide on which Certified Scrum Master Training you would attend accordingly.
The benefits of Agile
Agile’s continuous delivery approach has several advantages against the linear waterfall approach. Here’s an overview:
Manage change more effectively
By creating smaller iterations, the team is able to focus on providing value without having to present all the requirements upfront. At the end of each iteration, the team will review the backlog of advantages and re-prioritize so that time should be invested in the next Sprint.
Our Free Agile Scrum Training describes the Agile and Scrum foundations and different Agile and Scrum Certification options in detail. Enroll in our Free Agile Training now.
Improve customer engagement
Agile requires customers’ heavy involvement in the development process. The development team will look to clients to prioritize what’s going on in the next Sprint. Then, they review the work product during review sessions. This constant interaction reduces confusion between what the customer wants and what the developers will offer. Learn more in Scrum Master Course Online (including Free Course Links) post.
Focus on the highest priorities first
In a software development environment, you have to make many decisions and it is difficult to maintain their integrity. Your business backlog becomes your ultimate priority to-do list that’s out in public for all to see.
Increase your productivity
Agile makes better use of your resources, allowing it to start faster and stay productive all the time. With work divided into iterations, there is always a milestone and a deadline. The developers are always focused on re-globalizing and moving forward. They won’t sit idly by waiting to work during the Discover and Design phase.
Product owner feedback
By dividing the work into sprints, you can provide feedback before, during, and after each one. This collaboration provides frequent opportunities to ensure that the team is on its way to achieving set business goals.
A very collaborative environment
Agile values people, interactions, and customer cooperation. All team members have the purchase method completely. Project success depends on recognizing and improving each person’s objective experience.
Vision
Agile allows you to see and get to know the product intimately from start to finish. As you watch the app grow, you can provide feedback as it progresses.
Accuracy
After the sprint, the team will know their speed. This allows for better planning. In future sprints, this will be a testament to what they will be able to achieve.
Main features first
Agile allows us to prioritize and focus on the elements that provide the most impact on the business to deliver value faster.
Agree on clear definitions
Are the words “ready” and “done” confusing your IT team? In the world of Agile, you set the parameters of these definitions. The word “done” can mean the full test, or it can mean that the customer is ready for testing. Clear definitions give developers more accountability, and everyone agrees on the goals.
Improve transparency
Agile is characterized by high transparency. This comes when everyone from the stakeholders to the development team knows what gets done and what isn’t done. In addition, they know who makes the decisions when so the whole team understands the big picture, projects tend to move forward faster.
Agile methodologies: Scrum
As we mentioned before that agile has a wide variety of methodologies and practices. Thus, for you to decide which agile certified scrum master class you need to attend, you need to know which is the most popular of them. Consequently, we will explore the most prominent agile methodology, Scrum. Scrum encourages teams to learn through experiences, self-organize while working on problem-solving, and reflect on their gains and losses through continuous improvement. While Scrum is frequently utilized by software development teams, its principles and lessons can be applied to all types of teamwork.
This is one of the reasons Scrum is so popular. Scrum is often seen as an agile project management framework, describing a set of meetings, tools, and roles that work in coordination to help teams structure and manage their work. Scrum is experimental in that it provides a means for teams to create a vision about how they think about doing something, try it, think about it, and make appropriate adjustments. That is when the tire is used properly. Also, Scrum is designed in a way that allows teams to incorporate practices from other frameworks that make sense in relation to the team’s circumstances
The importance of the Scrum Framework
As we mentioned earlier in this article, Scrum is one of the most if not the most popular agile methodology. Thus, if you are making a decision related to obtaining Certified Scrum Master Training, you must understand first what are its benefits.
Better quality
Projects exist to achieve a vision or goal. Scrum provides a framework for continuous feedback and exposure to ensure that the quality is as high as possible. Scrum helps assure quality through the following practices:
- Determine and detail requirements in a timely manner so that knowledge of product features is as appropriate as possible.
- Incorporating daily testing and product owner feedback into the development process, allowing the development team to tackle issues when they are up-to-date.
- Regular and continuous improvement of the output of the Scrum team (product or service) through sprint reviews with stakeholders.
- The retrospective procedure, allowing the Scrum team to continuously improve team-specific factors such as processes, tools, relationships, and work environments.
- Completion of work using an achievement definition that addresses development, testing, integration, and documentation.
Reducing time to market
Scrum has a proven record of delivering end customer value 30 to 40 percent faster than traditional methods. This reduction in time is due to the following factors:
- Early initiation of development due to the fact that the pre-documentation stages of Waterfall projects (which usually take months) are taken for granted by having a dedicated product owner embedded in the Scrum team to gradually lay down requirements “in time” and provide clarification in real-time.
- The requirements with the highest priority are separated from those with the lowest priority.
- Increasingly offering value to the end customer means that higher value and risky requirements can be delivered before lower value requirements and risk.
- There is no need to wait to fully complete the project before putting anything on the market.
- Each Sprint has a predefined set of tasks/ user stories within the Sprint. At the end of each sprint, Scrum Teams produce action products and service increases that can be charged.
Increased return on investment
The decline in time to market is one of the main reasons why Scrum projects have a higher return on investment (ROI). Since other revenues and target benefits start to emerge soon, early accrual means higher overall return over time. This is the basic principle of net present value (NPV) calculations. In addition to the benefits of time to market, your return on investment with Scrum also increases by a good margin. Also, regular feedback through sprint reviews directly from stakeholders, including customers, allows course correction early, less expensive, and time-consuming than it is later in the process. Then, less costly disadvantages of automation and pre-testing mean less waste of work and faster deployments in addition to the previous, reducing failure costs. If a Scrum project is to fail, it will fail sooner and faster than Waterfall projects.
Increased customer satisfaction
Scrum enables the sponsors of the happiest project through the following:
- Collaborate with clients as partners and maintain client engagement and involvement in all project stages.
- Having a product owner expert in product requirements and customer needs.
- Keep your product backlog updated and prioritized to respond quickly to change.
- Demonstrate business functions to internal stakeholders and customers in every sprint review.
- Delivering the product to end customers faster and often with each release rather than offering it all at the end.
- Increasingly funding projects rather than requiring large upfront commitments.
Improved team morale
Working with happy people enjoying their jobs can be satisfying and beneficial. The art of self-management puts the decisions usually made by a manager or organization in the hands of the members of the scrum team. Scrum improves the morale of team members.
Being part of the self-management and self-organization team allows individuals to be creative, innovative, and recognized for their expertise. Thus, scrum teams can make tailored decisions to provide a balance between the professional and personal lives of team members. Also, the relationship between the product owner as a business representative in the scrum team aligns priorities between technical and business and helps dissolve organizational barriers. Having a Scrum Master, serving the Scrum team, removes blockages and protects the development team from outside interference.
Increased collaboration and ownership
When scrum teams take responsibility for projects and products, they can achieve great results. Scrum teams take ownership of quality.
Having the development team, product owner and scrum master work closely together on a daily basis, as well as, holding rapid planning meetings, allow the development team to organize its work around considered business priorities. Also, by holding daily Scrum meetings development team members can organize around work done, future work, and barriers. In addition, by conducting sprint reviews, the product owner makes their own prioritization decisions and the development team can view and discuss the product directly with stakeholders.
Improved visibility of progress and exposure
In Scrum projects, every member of the scrum team which includes the Scrum team and stakeholders has the opportunity to see how the project is going at any time. Transparency and visibility make an exposure model to help the scrum team accurately identify problems and more accurately predict how things will proceed as the project progresses. Scrum projects can provide a high level of visibility of progress through.
Increased project control
Scrum teams have many opportunities to control project performance and make corrections as needed due to the following practices:
- Adjusting priorities throughout the project in each sprint period rather than major stages of the organization allows for time-bound and fixed-price projects while accommodating the change.
- Embracing change allows the project team to interact with external factors such as market demand.
- The daily scrum format allows the Scrum team to quickly address issues as they arise, and come together to fulfill requirements.
Risks reduction
Scrum helps mitigate the risk of complete project failure – spending large amounts of time and money without a return on investment. Scrum teams deliver early incremental deliveries of product features allowing the team to experience potential failure early. So in case the scrum team faces failures it would be early if they fail at all, this is a concept called fail fast. The fail fast is achieved through the following practices:
- Getting high-risk tasks or features done first clarifies the failures early inexpensively.
- Deliver incrementally through sprints, ensuring a short time between initial investment in the project and either rapid failure or validation of the product or approach.
- Provide continuous feedback on products and processes.
Our Free Agile Scrum Training describes the Agile and Scrum foundations and different Agile and Scrum Certification options in detail. Enroll in our Free Agile Training now.
The most popular Scrum Master Certification Options
As scrum is the most popular practice among agile methodologies, there are multiple Agile Scrum Master certifications that test your scrum skills. These certifications are so diverse that many people get confused about them. Thus, we will provide you with the list of most popular Scrum Master certifications, so you can easily pick up your best Certified Scrum Master Training.
Professional Scrum Master – PSM
Provided by Scrum.org, PSM is one of the most popular scrum certifications. Normally PSM doesn’t require any perquisites like certified scrum master class or any other conditions. Thus, you can go directly to take its exam without attending a Certified Scrum Master Training. However, even if Certified Scrum Master Training is not a prerequisite, we still recommend that you at least attend Certified Scrum Master Training.
Certified Scrum Master – CSM
The most well-known certification for Scrum is the Scrum Alliance accredited Scrum Master. It has the most certified Scrum professionals, who may have more to do with their marketing intelligence and early accreditation in the Scrum certification field. The vast majority of job ads requesting Scrum certification require a CSM. Scrum Alliance is one of the early sponsors or Scrum practice offers this certificate.
CSM is the most popular Certified Scrum Master Training in the world. Due to its well know worldwide appeal, most companies request Scrum masters to obtain this Certified Scrum Master Training. As a result, this Certified Scrum Master Training became the number one go-to certification for scrum masters and project managers who wants to progress in their career. Scrum Alliance gained a lot of attention with its unique conditions for obtaining CSM certification. thus, making the certification holder and the Certified Scrum Master Training attendees demanded by the agile talent market.
SAFE Scrum master
The less known of the 3 major popular Certified Scrum Master certifications. It has certain prerequisites including attending a certified scrum master class. Thus, the certification is a bit harder to obtain than PSM. At the same time, SAFE Agile Training is usually provided in the context of the SAFE framework, which makes it special but still not the same. Due to the focus of Certified Scrum Master Training on scrum only, it provides Certified Scrum Master Training attendees with solid scrum knowledge.
Certified Scrum Master Training Requirements
We have covered a pretty big part of agile and scrum in general, you are now halfway through your journey to explore Certified Scrum Master Training. Since we already made our point about which is the most popular Scrum certification now we come to how to obtain it. Certified Scrum Master has pretty straight forward prerequisites. First, you must attend a two-day Certified Scrum Master Class instructed by a Scrum Alliance CST. Instead, you can attend 14 hours of live online certified scrum master class. Alternatively, you can make a face-to-face 25 hours interaction with your CAC. Once you have completed the Certified Scrum Master Training, you need to accept the Scrum Alliance license agreement. Then, you can sit for the CSM 50 question test. For you to pass the CSM test, you need to answer at least 37 correct answers out of the 50 questions within 60-minute.
How can I choose a Certified Scrum Master Class?
Now that we are looking to the real deal question of this article, “Which Certified Scrum Master Class I should attend?”. To answer this question there are important points that you need to verify first. Thus, we will provide you with a description of each one of these points in the following part of the article.
Instructor profile
The first and perhaps the most important factor is the instructor’s qualifications. There are a lot of instructors out there providing a wide variety of topics whether in-person or online. But what makes one instructor better than the other? Is it their education? Is it their field experience or his training experience. Did the instructor work to use Scrum and Agile in real-life action? The answer should be all of that. For an instructor to offer proper Certified Scrum Master Training, they must possess all of these qualifications.
These qualifications include their credentials as a Certified Scrum Master Training trainer in addition to the instructor’s previous Certified Scrum Master Training workshops. Also, you need to verify that their work experience whether they worked in a related field or not, were they a project manager, Scrum Master, or agile coach or not. Work experience provides a deep understanding of the Certified Scrum Master Training application. Following that you need to verify the instructor’s education level.
Course content and format
Generally speaking, course content may not vary much from one Certified Scrum Master Training provider to another. Yet, there are some indicators that the offered Certified Scrum Master Training is not valuable. You need to research the Certified Scrum Master Training course’s outline ensuring that the offering matches the CSM curriculum. In addition to the content, the Certified Scrum Master Training format also plays a major role in your learning. As a result, you need to verify the delivery format, is lecture-style content delivered from PowerPoint presentations? Or is class time dedicated to thought-provoking exercises and participation in discussion and group collaboration?
Real-life applications
Taking a Certified Scrum Master Training course means that you obtain the scrum knowledge. But is it enough? If you want the knowledge you can read the book, but if you want the experience you need to apply and practice. Thus, a valuable workshop sets a road map to hone your ability to apply what you have learned in your work teams. The right workshop offers Scrum case studies explaining how Scrum is used to create successful outcomes and optimized teams. At the same time, it should offer high-quality coaching experience to help you practice throughout the Certified Scrum Master Training. As a result, Certified Scrum Master Training’s best workshops will provide you multiple opportunities to collaborate with fellow learners. Also, high-quality workshops would use a visual, online collaboration environment that functions as a virtual classroom.
Provide track record
Research the CSM training provider’s track record and students’ feedback. This is an amazing way of assessing the Certified Scrum Master Training provider. Also ask people you may know who attended Certified Scrum Master Training or other training with this provider. Ensure you also review the success rate of each provider students in passing certification exams. As a result, you will have a fair assessment of each Certified Scrum Master Training provider. Research student reviews. The truth is, bad reviews are often good. But at least you can check if and why unhappy customers are. The coach who leads the whole process plays a huge role here. Their charisma and public speaking skills can be a game-changer. Make sure to check his or her background. It is very easy nowadays when we can access all social media platforms.
Certified Scrum Master online training cost
The cost of a certified scrum master training is important, but it is still one factor in a bigger equation. Do not verify the value of training for its price, carefully consider all the mentioned factors before you decide on the right Certified Scrum Master Training. If you have all the factors matching for two Certified Scrum Master Training options, then you can consider the cost of certified scrum master online training.
What is the cost of Certified Scrum Master online training?
Now that we clarified the Certified Scrum Master training cost factor’s importance let’s have a look at how much Certified Scrum Master training would cost you. The cost of Certified Scrum Master Training in the US ranges from 700 USD to 1095$ while the most prominent average Certified Scrum Master online training cost in the US is 1000$. Also it worth noting that Master of Project offers a CSM Training course at the cost of $970. That being said you should make sure you research on every Certified Scrum Master Training different qualities before making your decision.
Important Points to Consider When Choosing CSM Training
We have provided an extensive explanation of what factors you should consider while selecting your Certified Scrum Master Training provider. Now, we will offer you the final fine-tuning for your selection process. When you explore different Certified Scrum Master Training options you must verify that the instructor is a Certified Scrum Trainer or Coach. This is not an option as we mentioned in the Certified Scrum Master certification requirements a Certified Scrum Trainer® (CST®) must deliver the training. Alternatively, you can receive private coaching from a Certified Agile Coach (CAC). Additionally, make sure the provider registers you as a participant to the Scrum Alliance in order to take the CSM exam after a two-day class. Besides this, it is extremely important to validate whether the Certified Scrum Master Training provider offers you the exam included in the training package. Usually, these packages include two free attempts for the exam.
Additionally, in today’s dynamic world and Cov19 situation it is highly recommended that you focus on online Certified Scrum Master Training. This will help you save your time and give you the flexibility of learning from home.
Summary – Certified Scrum Master Training
In this article, we have covered the essential overview of Agile in general. Then moved on to explain the importance of agile methodologies and their key benefits. Then we explored Scrum and explained why scrum is the most important agile methodology. Following that, we have presented the most popular scrum certifications and explained briefly each one of these certifications. Also, we offered the reasons behind Certified Scrum Master Training being the most prominent certification among them.
As we moved forward we detailed the requirements for the Certified Scrum Master exam. In addition, we detailed the factors to consider while selecting the right Certified Scrum Master Training. Additionally, we have covered the average price for Certified Scrum Master Training. Finally, we listed down some other key points you need to consider while selecting the right Certified Scrum Master Training.
Given the provided information, imagine yourself learning from someone who read a book about scrum. Then imagine yourself learning from an experienced successful Scrum Master or project manager. There are major differences between these two different scenarios. If you add them to the instructor accreditation from Scrum Alliance and their previous track records you will have the right decision over your Certified Scrum Master Training.
Our Free Agile Scrum Training describes the Agile and Scrum foundations and different Agile and Scrum Certification options in detail. Enroll in our Free Agile Training now.
As an advice, you need to stay away from any promoted Certified Scrum Master Training without the instructor’s name announced. Also, avoid Certified Scrum Master Training with instructors with little to none real-life field experience or instructing experience. Additionally, review success stories for the previous students of the Certified Scrum Master Training and consider reading student reviews.