Consider this, you have to make a very critical decision, and there is a tight deadline looming overhead. You are working in a very competitive market and find yourself having to build and design a great number of products with innovation and a lot of functionality built in with a particular team that is set in. What if this team was unable to produce the results you need quickly, and instead took weeks or even months to do so, the market forces that have been looming overhead would certainly get a lot cloudier and eventually sink the ship. Worse yet, if in a few weeks all they are able to get to you is a half way reliable estimate for the project, you are definitely not in a great place. To make things were, the ambition of your boss as well as the impossible deadline are all breathing down your neck, all asking for answers while you’re not able to hold the ball. All of this is very bad, but these are real situations any project manager would have faced in their time working in product development, especially with more traditional firms who are yet to adopt more modern practices.
If your decision making is not agile and does not include components from the Scrum framework then this is a reality you will have to live with. When this is the case most project managers slip into a slow and gruelling ‘accounting exercise’ which is definitely detrimental to the efficient functioning of the organization and the project team, but often this seems like the only way to go. When the project heads have not undergone any csp training what they end up doing is making a mad dash for the spreadsheets and try and randomly guess or generate the numbers for effort-hours and other figures that they would need for the processes of designing, building and testing the features that the marketing team has promised or the customer has requested. This is a terrible way to do business and it funnels down from the top. While it isn’t a full-on solution, a csp certification can definitely go a long way towards helping the project leaders figure out exactly what decisions to make, with a high degree of agility as well as in accordance with Scrum principles. With this kind of training the managers are even able to make the best out of even the most ‘fuzzy’ set of requirements.
The important point in all of this is that we need to help managers become as agile as possible and understand as much of the Scrum methodology as they can, as it can really be a lifesaver. The benefits of having project management professionals take a csp course are not only numerous but multiply over time, as the managers are able to filter down their knowledge and understanding of these methodologies to their team members on the front lines. Taking a certified scrum professional coursewill expose managers to various techniques which exist that allow a better classification of the various features required into ‘complexity bins’. Most managers are able to map the various features required into these bins and this allows them to get better estimates for software sizing among other things. In fact these things can be learnt on the job with a csp online training programme which would cover all of the tools and techniques that Scrum offers to the professional along with ways to incorporate them in a meaningful way into the team’s workflow. These programmes ensure that the incorporation is done unobtrusively and the concepts are doled out in a way that is intuitive and understandable so that they can be implemented in the best way possible.
