Life after reaching PSM 3… What to do now?
Reaching my milestone goal of PSM 3
Couple of weeks ago, after half a year of studying, reading lots of medium articles and collecting every Scrum.org accreditation under the sun (except of course PSM 3 an PSPO3). I finally felt like I could give the PSM 3 exam a shot, and after a grueling 2,5 hours of exam taking, I walked away feeling exhausted, but most of all thankful for the journey and the experience.
For you see, during my research into the exam, I found endless blogposts about how hard it is, how to expect to retake the exam, how it takes a couple of weeks to grade and most of all that it is impossible to convey how the exam itself is, that you need to experience it first hand.
And while after taking the exam I understand why these posts were written this way, two days later… I received an email from Scrum.org. Congratulations on your new Badge at Scrum.org PSM 3!
I was able to pass the exam first try!
My mouth fell open..
reading this email, a follow up email soon arrived, containing the feedback and scoring of my exam. Followed by an email containing a PDF file of my accreditation. Celebrations were in order! I went to dinner with my girlfriend to celebrate, send out messages to colleagues current and old to celebrate my succes and thank them for their contributions to my growth.
The next week at the office, I received congratulations and celebrations, it simply felt amazing to finally achieve a goal I had been working towards for so long.
During the second week the celebrations continued but slowly they began to subdue.. leaving me with a gnawing empty feeling inside. When discussing this feeling with my friend and fellow Special Agent Mark, he directly responded to me with the following meme:
I have finally reached my goal, I am one of the biggest experts on Scrum in the world, now what am I going to do with this expertise?
While asking myself this question.. the answer became clear immediately for me: I want to share my knowledge and expertise to help people in the Agile world.
Agile blog writing: Let’s try it out!
Last week I was catching up on one of my favorite Agile podcasts: https://masteringagility.org/ and during the interview of S06 E01 Forever Employable with Jeff Gothelf, he mentioned the practice of writing a blog post every week.
What stood out to me when he was describing his process was the following:
- Jeff timeboxes the writing of his blog posts to a maximum of 1 hour every Sunday
- He normally uses something that occurred during his week as inspiration.
- Not every blog post has to be a hit, the process of writing about your experiences, deepening the understanding is more important.
- Sometimes your blog post will help someone somewhere in the future who is struggling with the same issue, it is impossible to know.
- So basically he takes an Agile approach to Blog posting.
I was taken in by this approach, and so I have decided to give it a try! Starting with this Medium article I will aim to post a weekly article to share my knowledge and expertise on Scrum, discuss any confounding topics questions or issues I encounter during the week or if all else fails.. I will write whatever is on my mind this day.
The timebox for today is reaching its end so hope to see you next week.
(to be fair I actually went over for 15 minutes trying to find out how Medium works, but that is something for the retrospective)
