Skip to content

I’m a project manager, is the CSM a good fit for me?

Yes, it is.

It can be challenging for project managers though.

Why?

Because a project manager traditionally thrives within structured and ordered environments.

Their training and experience are built on the foundation of process, procedures and moving from project milestone to project milestone in a linear, cascading style known as waterfall-style project management.

In other words, where all the variables are known upfront and it is clear who needs to perform work, in a specific order of work.

The project manager is managing the environment and ensuring that everything that needs to be delivered is delivered within the predetermined time frames.

Agile works differently.

It is a far more fluid style of working and involves a great deal of experimentation, learning and continuous improvement.

Waterfall-style project management excels in traditional, complicated working environments but it rarely works well with product and service development.

Especially if that problem has never been solved before or that product has never existed.

It falls over because the answers aren’t known upfront, nor can all the variables be known until you discover and create the answers.

This style of learning from what is known and proven is called Empiricism. And empiricism is the base of Scrum theory.

In other words, we know what we know because we have evidence that it is so.

21st Century Problems

Over the past 21 years, the world has become increasingly more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

The Agile Manifesto was created in 2001 to deal with this challenging new world, and over the past 21 years it has increasingly greater application outside of software engineering because the rest of the world has become increasingly complex.

Often, we don’t know all the variables, nor do we know the answers to the problems we must solve.

We don’t know how the external environment is going to impact our work and we don’t know which products and services must be created in order to achieve competitive advantage.

Asking a single person, such as a project manager, to guess these elements upfront and form a project charter and schedule is setting that person up for failure.

Advantages of the CSM course

As project managers increasingly encounter these problems, it becomes increasingly valuable for those project managers to master new ways of working.

That is why we believe the CSM course is a great fit for project managers.

Some project managers are absolutely awesome from a product perspective and as such, the Certified Scrum Product Owner course becomes a great natural fit for them after completing the Certified Scrum Master course.

Others are great at working with people and creating environments where teams can thrive. This is where Scrum Masters dwell and it creates a natural fit for project managers who like working with people to achieve team goals and objectives.

The CSM course introduces agile and scrum frameworks and demonstrates how small teams can collaborate toward creative solutions and product development.

It also demonstrates how a lightweight framework for product and service development can help development teams create products that have never existed before and solve problems to which there doesn’t appear to be an answer.

Benefit of Project Managers on the CSM course

Having project managers on the CSM course enhances the experience for everyone on the course.

The kind of questions that are asked and the perspective offered by project managers enables everyone at the course to benefit from the answers that are given.

A deeply experienced project manager asks incisive questions and has a great deal of experience to draw on when it comes to understanding how Scrum and Agile frameworks differ from traditional frameworks for project management.

It allows our Certified Scrum Trainers to offer unique insights that benefit everyone on the course.

Our Certified Scrum Trainers are deeply experienced agile practitioners as well as Scrum/Agile coaches who have worked at the coalface of Agile transformations for over a decade.

Their experience and expertise offer project managers unique insights into the ideal Scrum and Agile environments but also, more importantly, to the development of those environments when a company is making the transition from traditional to Agile ways of working.

If you are a project manager and are looking to become a Scrum Master, visit our Certified Scrum Master course page. Also view the Advanced Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Professional Scrum Master course pages.

Frequently Asked Scrum Master Questions

Frequently asked Training and Certification questions

Tags: