Becoming a Certified ScrumMaster

At Equinox IT, our development team uses a Kanban board with a Lean software development approach. In my pre-Equinox times, I was involved in Scrum projects as a Scrum development team member.

Consistent with the Lean principle of ‘keep getting better’, Equinox IT is committed to continuous learning and improving. As such, a group of us attended our own Certified ScrumMaster course, delivered by training partner Rowan Bunning of Scrum WithStyle.

Heading into the training I did have question-marks about the value of the Scrum framework. From my experience and the setup in the pre-Equinox project, I previously considered the Scrum rules of time-boxing, cross-functional teams, and product owner’s responsibility for the product backlog to be challenging and inconsistently effective.

However, the CSM course turned out to be a real eye-opener for me, in many aspects. Rowan delivered the course in a highly interactive manner, with enough background theory and real-world stories mixed in. He demonstrated with evidence the value of the Scrum components that I had previously questioned.

As a result, I highly recommend putting your whole Scrum team, or at least Product Owner and ScrumMaster, on this course. Your process will benefit greatly from the team’s better understanding of Scrum. People fulfilling the critical Product Owner role and analyst roles should also consider the Certified Scrum Product Owner course which is well suited to the needs of these roles on a Scrum project.

The challenges I had identified prior now appear much smaller to me. I am looking forward to engaging in my next Scrum project with high confidence. The learning has also been highly valuable for the Lean Software Development approaches we are using on my current project at Equinox, as both approaches are grounded in similar Agile doctrine with overlap of underlying principles.