Points of Interest

Before gaining the Professional Scrum Master I certification two days ago, I gained the Certified Scrum Product Owner certificate after a training with Roman Pichler in february. I’m currently listed as CSPO at scrumalliance.org.

Overview

Four weeks ago, I wrote about trainings, classes, and certificates. Meanwhile I attended a PSM training with Ken Schwaber.

Assessment

Part of the contract was one free attempt of scrum.org’s Professional Scrum Master I Assessment, which I successfully passed yesterday. It consists of 80 multiple choice questions, and the timebox is 60 minutes. To gain the certificate, the rate of correctly answered questions must be better than 85%. IMO you won’t pass the test in case you do not really share an agile mindset, which is required to answer some of the questions. In case you got interested, there’s the Scrum Open Assessment which asks 30 questions in 60 minutes (which I finished in 17 minutes).

Certificate

While writing this posting, scrum.org sent me the logo (see above), the certificate, and put my name on the stack. For me, two years after I introduced Scrum at my current employer’s, it’s just one minor step while learning more about product management, project management, agile software development (including Scrum, of course), and adjacent topics.

Inspect and Adapt

So what’s next? The more I learn, the more I want to learn even more. The next stack of books already is sitting on my couch, and I really enjoy the journey to grow my agile capabilities. The future will prove whether I will find opportunities to make good use of them.

In their book¹, Boris Gloger and André Häusling describe a (fictive) scenario where a company struggles with recruiting a ScrumMaster. One year after they finally filled the vacancy, they are searching anew, as the candidate signed off. Subsequently they share some knowledge how to attract and select Scrum specialists.

During this year’s ScrumDay, sipgate searched for talents by distributing this flyer:

Content Translation

As it is written in german tongue, here’s a brief abstract of its content:

• Five Scrum Teams are responsible for the products.
• Team members are visiting trainings and conventions frequently.
• Attractive office.
• Extra office hours are avoided.
• Thirty days of vacation are granted.
• Employments are long-term contracts.
• No pressure by investors or banks.
• Team building is not limited to office hours. It is continued during parties, BBQs, and even breakfast.
• Bleeding edge products are developed with joy and passion.
• sipgate is a successful and growing company.

High Performance

The goal of agile product development environments is to set up »high performance«² teams. To achieve this in order to develop »products that customers love«³, you need to hire outstanding people, who will joyfully give the very best they can.

The flyer states that sipgate does not only talk about agile product development, but that they are applying it day by day. Its back provides a checklist for meeting invitations:

Freely translated, the statement below the list reads as follows:

At sipgate this list is used for two reasons:

• It requires to plan any meeting so it gets clear whether the meeting is necessary.
• The invitees can verify whether it makes sense to attend the meeting.

Conclusion

The reader gets the impression that sipgate does not only talk about agile, but is actually doing it all day, so that chances are given they will attract the “right” people. IMO it is a great example of recruitment of an agile company.

Thanksgiving

I’d like to thank sipgate for providing the flyer in PDF format and for the permission to use it for this posting.

¹ Boris Gloger, André Häusling »Erfolgreich mit Scrum – Einflussfaktor Personalmanagement« 2011, ISBN 978-3-446-42515-6, chapter 3.1

² Lyssa Adkins, »Coaching Agile Teams« 2010, ISBN-13 978-0-321-63770-3, chapter 2

³ Roman Pichler, »Agile Product Management with Scrum – Creating Products that Customers Love« 2010, ISBN-13 978-0-321-60578-8