Live Open Hour with iZenBridge: Episode 45

At our open-hour session, you are invited to post your queries and get them answered by some of the top experts from the industry. Let it be Agile management, Agile Coaching, Estimation, related to certifications, follow-up queries, or any other aspect of project management, you are invited to speak your mind. The open hour invites are shared in advance mostly it is conducted on the 2nd and 4th Friday at 7 PM IST (+5.5 GMT).

Here are the top questions discussed in our Live Open Hour Episode#45 session, which was streamed live on 9th December 2022, many queries asked by participants regarding the right certification/training for professional growth were discussed by our expert Saket Bansal.

Question: Which certification will be best for a lead business analyst with six years of experience using Scrum?

Question: I am working as a transition manager. Can you recommend some certifications for me?

Question: As a scrum master, how do you track your team member day-to-day tasks?

Question: Why should one do PMP Certification?

Question: Is Kanban good to have as part of the SAFe or Agile education?

Question: How important is it to renew certifications like PMP?

Here is the summarized answer given by Saket Bansal for questions asked by participants-

Question: Which certification will be best for a lead business analyst with six years of experience using Scrum?

Saket : Usually, a Business Analyst is a functional domain-based rather than a technical role. Therefore, picking the certification for a business analyst role depends on the environment you are working in. For example, as you are working in scrum, a good starting certificate will be a Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) . After that, you can go for an Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner (A-CSPO) program offered by Scrum Alliance.

Your core skill should be understanding and knowing what business needs. For that, you need to focus on topics like user stories, features, acceptance criteria, functional acceptance criteria, and non-functional acceptance criteria, and do a user Journey map. These skills help in communicating business needs well to the development teams. Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) and Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner (A_CSPO) certifications will cover most of the required skills and competencies for the Business Analyst role and prepare you to play Product Owner in the scrum team.

Question: I am working as a transition manager. Can you recommend some certifications for me?

Saket: As your role is more about transitioning from one way of working to another, you can focus on learning change management-related programs. Because in the process of transitioning, you end up facilitating the change.
Change management is associated with agile coaching, and we have a few certification programs that help acquire knowledge of the change, transformation, and transition in an agile context. You can explore some agile coaching certifications if your current experience, knowledge, and competency are related to Agile change management. There is one program called ICAgile Certified Professional-Agile Coaching (ICP-ACC) which is like an agile coaching program primarily to understand the team level of coaching work. There is another program on transitioning or transformation space called ICAgile Certified Professional – Coaching Agile Transitions (ICP-CAT).

Question: As a scrum master, how do you track your team member day-to-day tasks?

Saket: When we work in an environment where the manager is super expert, and the executors are just performing the task, tracking team members becomes the manager’s responsibility.
In the scrum way of working, managers or scrum master is not expected to be expert in the team’s work domain. In scrum, the team is empowered to explore and create their task. The manager creates a structure where work is transparently shared among the team members. So here, as a Scrum master, you need to ensure that task transparency is maintained, and this can be done using a tool like JIRA. Conduct daily scrum where team members can discuss their tasks and challenges, which will help keep the task transparent. So instead of tracking, make the work visible to everyone, encourage the team to share it and get it done as a team.

Question: Why should one do PMP Certification?

Saket: If your focus is growing and learning about project management, you can do it with the help of management education, self-study like watching videos, and so on.
Typically people go for certification to increase their brand value in the market. When going for PMP certification, you need to understand if there will be value added to your profile after this certification. Before doing PMP certification try to understand the business need and your personal growth after PMP certification and whether it will be worth the investment you are making to acquire the certification.

Question: Is Kanban good to have as part of the SAFe or Agile education?

Saket: SAFe is founded on the idea of Agile, Lean and Kanban, DevOps, product development and overall portfolio Management concepts.
So, the ideas of Kanban are used extensively in a scaled agile framework. We have Kanban boards at the team, program, and portfolio levels. Kanban can be used in various ways, and when we go for SAFe certification, we learn how SAFe uses Kanban, and SAFe training assumes that people have basic knowledge of Kanban.
So, Kanban is included in all SAFe programs to an extent which is suitable for the SAFe way of working, but if you want to learn Kanban from an independent perspective, that is, with or without SAFe or Kanban as a theory. Then Kanban University programs KMP1 and KMP2 are the good ones.

Question: How important is it to renew certifications like PMP?

Saket: Renewal of certification will be important if your profile is demanding PMP certification. The knowledge which you have gained while doing certification will remain with you even when your certificate is expired but if you need to showcase your certification or if that certificate will add value to your profile, then you must renew it.

We hope you could have related to some of these questions, and they might have helped you in some way.

To get more assistance, you can connect with the iZenBridge Team.

📧Email us at (sales@izenbridge.com)

📞WhatsApp Us: +91-9958287711

For more such insights and a lot of interaction with the industry experts, stay tuned for our next “Live Open Hour” which is conducted Every second and fourth Friday at 7 PM IST on