The Scaled Professional Scrum Exam

I recently took scrum.org’s Scaled Professional Scrum exam. Scaling scrum to work across multiple teams is a difficult and controversial topic with several different frameworks and organisations vying for dominance. Less, SAFe, and Nexus all offer courses and solutions to this difficult challenge. Personally I opted to take the Nexus exam because I’d already studied it while revising for my PSM-II (and I’d liked what I’d seen) and because I hold scrum.org’s approach to learning I’m very high regard.

There are courses out there you can attend (and I have no doubt that they’re of excellent standard) however personally I chose to self study. I read the Nexus Guide, worked my way through the resources section, and read the recommended book. I also used the Open Assessment on this website.

You should be aware that the questions on the Open Assessment are only a subset and are only a sample of what you’ll face in the real exam. The questions for real are more akin to the PSM-II test with real world scenarios and you being asked which is the best approach. As with the PSM-II it’s not a matter of all answers except one being wrong and you often have to work out which one (or multiple) answers are the best.

You should also be the exam is almost entirely Nexus focused (which I expect goes without saying)l don’t expect 80% Scrum with 20% Nexus. Every one of the 40 multiple choice questions will test your knowledge and understanding of developing a product with multiple scrum teams.

I didn’t find myself under any time pressure. You have an hour and it only took me about 40 minutes to answer and verify all the questions. Nowhere near the sort of time pressure you face with the PSM-III.

Overall a really interesting exam with interesting topics. Definitely not one for a scrum beginner. But if you’ve passed your PSM-I or PSPO-I exam and would like to look at how scrum.org recommend scaling up to multiple teams then well worth a look.