If you are serious about reaping the benefits from transforming to an agile culture, using a CSP+ — Certified Scrum Professional (CSP), Certified Team Coach (CTC), Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC), Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) — is key. CSP+ individuals are seasoned scrum masters, product owners or developers, having demonstrated under significant scrutiny:
- Multiple years of direct experience with scrum teams, as a scrum team member, mentor and/or coach
- Significant formal professional development
- Continuous and ongoing informal learning
- Involvement and service in the agile community
- Contributions to agile conversations as a thought leader
- Ability to demonstrate and teach agile techniques
The Scrum Alliance approves all CSP+ applications to ensure all requirements have been successfully met. The CSP+ designations are not easy to obtain and reflect a professional who has made the pursuit of agility part of their professional development plan.
At a minimum, Platinum Edge engages with CSP agile coaches because we believe their proven experience and leadership significantly increases the success of our clients’ agile transformations. In the minimum three years required to become a CSP (more for CTC, CEC and CST), assuming our coaches worked in two-week sprints during their CSP+ candidacy, we know our coaches have at least:
- Participated in or facilitated more than 750 daily scrums
- Participated in or facilitated 78 individual sprint planning, sprint review and sprint retrospective meetings, and at least as many backlog refinement sessions, as well as numerous release planning sessions
- Addressed or resolved, on average, hundreds of roadblocks or impediments
- An intimate understanding of the product owner, scrum master and development team roles, along with the 12 agile principles and 5 scrum values
- Guided multiple teams setting vision, creating roadmaps, managing backlogs, creating high quality user stories with acceptance criteria and understanding the value of an impediments log
- An understanding of the importance and organizational confidence created by anchoring to the definition of done
- Experience coaching at all levels of an organization
- Numerous successful releases under their belts
- Plenty of battle scars, giving credibility that they have “been there done that,” from which your organization can benefit
Leveraging CSP+ agile coaches with such valuable experience can help organizations embrace agile principles and deliver value to customers sooner than by trying to do it on their own.
The bottom line is: practice makes permanent, so what kind of permanent do you want? Developing talent in-house without expert support will cost you years and probable missteps with significant ups and downs. Engage today with CSP+ talent to start your agile journey off right and to mentor the people who will become your internal CSP+ talent as you mature beyond initial transformation.
