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PSK Class Title, Course Design & Assessment: My Views

Last post 07:59 am August 25, 2019 by Ian Mitchell
1 reply
Syed Shabid Ali
06:47 am August 25, 2019

Having recently participated in PSK class and cleared the assessment, 3 things come to my mind which might look harsh at the first reading but I strongly believe these are worth discussing:

I felt that the course title should have been: “Flow Practices for Professional Scrum Teams”.  This course is primarily about 4 flow practices (inspired by & borrowed from Kanban) & 4 flow metrics and usage of the same in Scrum Events. This course is not an ‘additive’ increment of Professional Scrum Class nor about Kanban. In fact, if you are already a Kanban Practitioner, first unlearn/temporarily forget certain things such as Lead Time, SLA etc., for the length of the class at least. Also, as we seriously care about "entirety" of Scrum all the time, we obviously don’t have the right to use the word Kanban either.

Throughout the course, Scrum was pictured as “deficient” in flow practices. Unfortunately the course designers completely ignored (?) the scope of Scrum. Scrum is designed to be ‘less prescriptive’ & ‘open to a large extent’ about both flow & engineering practices. It gave us the freedom to choose from a myriad choices. Now, tomorrow someone comes and say that Scrum is missing detailed facilitation techniques for Scrum Events, how will you feel? Will we not say: "If you want prescriptive things for each and every aspect of your process, then go and look somewhere else, Scrum is not for you"?. These are the reasons I felt that It should have been correctly pictured as “because scrum left it open”, today we are able to pick these Kanban-borrowed flow practices as one of the choices.

I understand from the forum that PSK assessment used to be very tough initially when it got introduced. Though I did not score a 100, I am afraid to say that now it’s made as simpler (?). There are hardly any scenario based questions, which are usually the major strength of scrum.org assessments. 

The above are purely my views, not intended to hurt anyone in anyway. Healthy discussions are welcome. #Openness #Courage #Respect

Ian Mitchell
07:59 am August 25, 2019

I think the observations you make are reasonable and you are not alone in having made them.

My suggestion is that it may be best to view other descriptions of Kanban more critically, rather than to “unlearn” anything by studying PSK. This is precisely because PSK returns the emphasis to matters of flow. 

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