I wrote a blog post in April on studying for Professional Scrum Master (PSM) II. Last week, I took the exam and scored 100%.

PSM II was called Professional Scrum Practitioner (PSP) before 2016. After that, it was renamed PSM II to bridge the gap between PSM I and PSM III. This exam focuses on applying Scrum in the workplace, as evidenced by its old name. Without extensive experience working as a Scrum Master, this exam would be challenging. Luckily, I have over five years of experience working in all the Scrum accountabilities.

In April, I spent a week planning and finding study materials. There are quite a few books on Scrum that are widely recommended. As I couldn’t read them all before the exam, I picked three and read them within 6 weeks.

Scrum: A Pocket Guide is an extension of the Scrum Guide. It is a good book if you are new to Scrum. However, if you are familiar with Scrum, you may skip this book – I finished it in one day but didn’t acquire much additional knowledge.

Software in 30 Days is a book written by the creator of Scrum. It begins with the objective of producing software in 30 days and tells how to achieve this. The authors impressed me by telling the story of Scrum adoption without using the word “Scrum” till the second half of the book. This became one of my coaching strategies, as some audiences don’t like hearing technical terms. I prefer to drive them to take action. After they enjoy the benefits, I reveal the name of their work.

Scrum Mastery: From Good To Great Servant-Leadership is the best book among the three I selected. It is actually a case bank – containing lots of short stories about teams that had suffered before and how they strived for improvement. It enriched my database of possible scenarios in the future and how I should coach the team to improve the situations.

After reading these books, I was equipped with more situational problems and their solutions. However, to acquire the certification, I had to pass the exam. Nothing is better than grinding the retrieval practice. In the next 17 days until the exam day, I worked on various practice tests and strived to get full marks. If I answered incorrectly, I always checked the related paragraphs from the Scrum Guide, the Nexus Guide, the EBM Guide, and other official guides. After I had finished the designated amount of practice tests, I stopped and did other things instead. This prevented me from overloading my brain.

That’s my journey to achieving 100% in PSM II, even though I caught a fever three days before the exam.

Will I take PSM III? Probably not shortly. While doing the practice tests in the final week, I found my focus had shifted from learning Scrum to sharpening exam techniques. Learning Scrum had become a byproduct of exam preparation. How funny it was. PSM II consists of multiple-choice questions, while PSM III asks similar questions as PSM II, but requires answering them as an essay. Working on similar exam content brings fewer benefits in terms of preparation time and money (USD 500).

Yes, there are only about 1000 PSM III holders in the world. But being one of the 32,000 PSM II holders is already much more competitive than PSM I, which has almost 580,000 holders. Furthermore, holding PSM III doesn’t mean you’re experienced in leading, training, and coaching teams and organizations in their Scrum adoption. You’re probably just a skilled exam performer.

So what’s my next action? Recently, I’ve been coaching three teams in my company in their Scrum adoption. Inspired by Scrum Mastery and the blogs I’ve been reading, I will write blog posts on findings related to Agile and Scrum. I may also write about the situations I faced and how I helped the teams achieve success. I think I will gain much more by practising Scrum and Agile and writing about my experiences than I would by preparing for the next certification. I hope to improve my storytelling and writing skills as well.