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The Transition from ScrumBut to Scrum

Last post 03:26 am March 2, 2020 by Anthony Amos
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Anthony Amos
03:26 am March 2, 2020

I have performed as a self-trained Scrum Master, Product Owner and Developer in 3 organizations for over 7 years. They have all been "ScrumBut" organizations, so they didn't actually implement real Scrum. But I invested time learning on my own, so I've been aware of what Scrum should be. I've also been quite frustrated by the false Scrum practices imposed by so many companies. So a month ago I decided to go for certification. I also wanted to pick a challenging certification, not just attend a class where you understand a few concepts, and "ta-daa" your certified!

So I came to Scrum.org. I followed the recommendations and read everything in the Scrum Master Learning Path. My most difficult challenge was to ignore my experience from working on teams that claimed to Agile but were not. Although I'm aware of the differences between right and wrong Scrum, I still had to break learned habits for the assessment. So even though all the material in the Learning Path are not covered on the assessments, I read them anyway because they were very helpful when it came to reinforcing my understanding of the topics. I knew I'd have to over-prepare in order to cancel out habitual thinking that could knock me off course.

My next step was to take every practice test I could find repeatedly until I scored 100% on all of them. I am happy with the results. I scored 98.8% on the PSM I, then kept hitting more practice tests for another week and scored 100% on PSM II. I am more motivated than ever to be selective and not waste anymore time in organizations that pretend to be Agile. My perception is, in the United States, that the number of companies that practice "ScrumBut" outnumber the companies that practice Scrum. Hopefully I'm wrong.

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