In my professional career I have been project manager for many years in different types of environments and for different types of projects. I have studied frameworks, methodologies, and bodies of knowledge in depth; all to serve my clients and teams as best as I could.
In my quest for being at my best to serve, I have gone through accreditation processes to become a professional trainer in many of these. I have successfully passed and facilitated quite a few of these tracks. I have been trainer in PRINCE2® and PRINCE2 Agile®, in Management of Portfolios (MoP®) and Portfolio, Programme and Project Offices (P3O®), and in AgilePM®. I have furthermore been certified in Managing Successful Programmes MSP® and in Change Management, and I was Project Management Professional (PMP)® certified by the Project Management Institute (PMI®). Jep, I was quite serious about it at that time...
And still…
All these methodologies and bodies of knowledge helped me in a certain way, yet never to my full satisfaction. Something was missing.
For one or another reason I always went back to two small papers; a manifesto and a framework: the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (https://agilemanifesto.org/), and the Scrum framework (https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html). Apparently I always found a solution in there; for each challenge on my road.
Because of this, at certain moments in my career I decided to fully abandon all the project management related trainer and other certificates and fully focus on agility. Not that these project management methodologies were no good; they did help me understand what works and what doesn't in a given context. While I was already using the Scrum framework since 2001, be it in a Zombie way, it was time to take agility dead seriously. The Scrum framework already helped me in the past, and it has never let me down since.
With the teams I worked with, we always found solutions living the agile value. We really were uncovering better ways of developing solutions by doing it and helping others do it. And I really came to value individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working solutions over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan.
Using my past experiences as Project Management Professional (PMP)® and Professional Scrum Master™ (PSM™) I decided to write a series of blog posts relating project management skills and a professional use of the Scrum framework. Correct, the Scrum framework does not have a role or accountability ‘project manager’. Yet, some of the skills are quite useful to have in your team.
I hope you will find value in these short articles and if you are looking for more clarifications, feel free to take contact.
If you want to take a deeper dive into the concepts we are covering in this blog series, then surely check out our Professional Scrum Mastery workshop. We have some scheduled in the coming period.
Don't want to miss any of these blog posts? Have the “From PM to PSM” series weekly in your mailbox.
Wishing you an inspiring read and a wonderful journey.
Scrum on.
Steven
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Project Management Professional (PMP)®, PMBOK® Guide, PMI® are registered marks of Project Management Institute, Inc.
PRINCE2® , PRINCE2 Agile®, MSP®, MoP®, P3O® are (registered) Trade Marks of Axelos Limited. All rights reserved.
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Professional Scrum Master™ (PSM™) is a trademark of Scrum.org and may be registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.