How to achieve the PSMII certification

Last friday I’ve passed my PSMII provided by the Scrum.org with a 95,3%! Yeah^^.After publishing this new in my LinkedIN I received a lot of new requests from people very engaged with Scrum and Agile. A lot of people asked about some tips to pass this certification, so I decided to create this article in order to share with the Scrum community.

Notice, that in my case I didn’t attend to any course. I took my first Scrum training 5 years ago but I didn’t try the certification, so I prepare everithing by myself searching in some blogs, articles and preparing “my own plan to pass this exam”. One year ago, I did the same for passing the PSMI assesment.

• First of all, you need years of background in real world working with software. In my case aprox 4 years, cause I’ve combined this role with another roles such as QA or Agile Coach. Now, I fully dedicated to be a Scrum Master. And consequently I’ve used this experience to be a professional Agile Coach. You need different variety of experiences, different levels / stages of a team, and you need different technologies to compare and to test yourself. There is not one-way to be the perfect Scrum Master.

Tests.

You need to learn to make how Scrum.org will test you. Here there’s a lot of options. I’ve used this (some of them are useful for PSMI):

• PSM™ I Exam Simulator (2021 update) :: Management Plaza (mplaza.training)
• PSM I™ Preparation Quiz — Learning Mode — Mikhail Lapshin (mlapshin.com)
• https://www.certification-questions.com/thanks.html?productId=Scrum-PSM-II&affiliate=&price=79.99&currency=EUR&txID=nypjnwmw&promoCode=&t=1612366504109
• Ultimate Professional Scrum Master II (PSM II) Practice Assessment — TheScrumMaster.co.uk
• Unbored Training
• Open Assesments: Scrum Open | Scrum.org (Scrum Open + Product Owner Open + Scrum Developer Open)

Books:

You can see a lot of list of suggested books to pass this exam. I’ve created my own (those which appear in bold are the ones read before this exam):

• Coaching Agile Team. Lyssa Adkins.
• Scrum. A pocket guide. A smart travel companion. Gunther Verheyen Scrum.
• Reinventing Organizations bu Frederik Laloux.
• Mastering Professional Scrum: A practitioner’s guide to Overcoming Challenges and Maximizing the Benefits of Agility by Stephanie Ockermand and Simon Reindl.
• The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures by Henri Lipmanowiz and Keith McCandless.
• The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum by Kurt Bittner, Patricia Kong and Dave West.
• The Professional Product Owner by Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham.
• The DevOps Handbook by Kim, Debois, Williz and Humble.
• Lean Change Management by Jason Little.

Scrum Master Learning Path

Scrum Master Learning Path | Scrum.org

I’ve review aprox the 45% from the such a quantity of information. Really valuable however you need a lot of time to read everything.

Preparation Time

I’ve started at the beginning of September. My first plan was to prepare everything during three months and after that take the exam. In this process in my November I changed my plan and I got another certifications in Kanban: TKP, KSD and KSI during November and beginning of December. In that time I changed the “deadline” to late January.

After Christmas time, my job, the pandemian, and Filomena, I was not confortable enough so I decided to hurry up and try the exam at the end of Februrary.

And finally I want to say thank you to the people that is close to me and they give me a lof of energy to keep improving in my job. You know who you are :)

Cheers!