A-CSM
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A-CSM
The Advanced Certified ScrumMaster (A‑CSM) equips experienced Scrum Masters with advanced facilitation, coaching, servant‑leadership, impediment resolution, and scaling techniques, enabling them to drive high‑performing, self‑organizing teams across complex organizations.
Who Should Take This
It is intended for Scrum Masters who have at least twelve months of practical experience and have already earned the CSM credential. These professionals seek to deepen their facilitation and coaching skills, resolve organizational impediments, and lead Scrum adoption at scale. Their goal is to become strategic change agents within agile enterprises.
What's Covered
1
Domain 1: Advanced Facilitation
2
Domain 2: Coaching Fundamentals
3
Domain 3: Servant Leadership and Self-Organization
4
Domain 4: Organizational Impediment Resolution
5
Domain 5: Scaling Scrum
6
Domain 6: Product Goal and Backlog Excellence
7
Domain 7: ScrumMaster Professional Development
What's Included in AccelaStudy® AI
Adaptive Knowledge Graph
Practice Questions
Lesson Modules
Console Simulator Labs
Exam Tips & Strategy
20 Activity Formats
Course Outline
66 learning goals
1
Domain 1: Advanced Facilitation
4 topics
Facilitation design and preparation
- Design collaborative facilitation agendas for Scrum events that match team maturity, attendee dynamics, and desired outcomes while accounting for time constraints and remote participation.
- Apply divergent and convergent thinking techniques to structure facilitated sessions that first generate diverse ideas and then systematically narrow options toward actionable decisions.
- Analyze facilitation effectiveness by evaluating participant engagement levels, decision quality, and follow-through rates to identify improvement areas in facilitation approach.
Conflict facilitation
- Apply conflict resolution models such as Thomas-Kilmann modes to facilitate productive disagreements and guide teams from destructive conflict toward constructive outcomes.
- Design facilitation interventions that address power imbalances within the team, ensuring all voices are heard and preventing dominant personalities from suppressing diverse perspectives.
- Analyze recurring conflict patterns within a Scrum team to distinguish between symptoms and root causes, determining whether conflicts stem from process, technical, interpersonal, or organizational sources.
Working agreements and group norms
- Apply working agreement creation techniques that incorporate team input, establish shared accountability, and define explicit norms for communication, decision-making, and collaboration.
- Analyze the effectiveness of existing working agreements by observing team behaviors and identifying gaps between stated agreements and actual practices to recommend revisions.
Remote and distributed facilitation
- Apply remote facilitation techniques including virtual whiteboards, breakout rooms, and asynchronous collaboration tools to maintain engagement and productivity in distributed Scrum events.
- Analyze the unique challenges of distributed teams including time zone differences, cultural diversity, and reduced non-verbal communication to adapt facilitation approaches accordingly.
- Design hybrid meeting structures for teams with both co-located and remote members that ensure equitable participation regardless of physical location.
2
Domain 2: Coaching Fundamentals
4 topics
Coaching stances and techniques
- Apply the four coaching stances — teaching, mentoring, facilitating, and coaching — selecting the appropriate stance based on the coachee's experience level and the nature of the challenge.
- Apply active listening and powerful questioning techniques to help team members and stakeholders gain deeper insight into their own assumptions, behaviors, and improvement opportunities.
- Analyze the effectiveness of different coaching stances in specific situations to determine when to shift from directive teaching to non-directive coaching as team maturity increases.
- Design a coaching approach for a newly formed Scrum team that progressively transitions from teaching Scrum fundamentals to facilitating self-discovery as the team matures.
Coaching individuals and teams
- Apply coaching techniques to help Product Owners improve backlog management, stakeholder communication, and value maximization without taking over the Product Owner accountability.
- Apply coaching techniques to help Developers improve self-management, technical practices, and collaborative behaviors while respecting their autonomy over implementation decisions.
- Analyze resistance to coaching by identifying defensive behaviors, fixed mindset patterns, and trust deficits, then determine strategies for building psychological safety and coaching receptivity.
Motivation and engagement
- Apply intrinsic motivation frameworks such as autonomy, mastery, and purpose to design team environments that sustain engagement and reduce reliance on extrinsic incentives.
- Analyze team motivation indicators including energy levels, initiative frequency, and collaboration quality to detect early signs of disengagement and burnout.
- Design motivation recovery strategies for teams experiencing low morale, addressing root causes such as unclear goals, lack of autonomy, unrealistic expectations, or insufficient recognition.
Psychological safety and trust building
- Apply psychological safety practices to create team environments where members feel safe to take interpersonal risks, admit mistakes, and raise concerns without fear of punishment.
- Analyze trust levels within the Scrum team using observable indicators such as vulnerability in conversations, willingness to give and receive feedback, and constructive challenge frequency.
- Design trust-building interventions for teams experiencing low psychological safety, incorporating structured vulnerability exercises, feedback norms, and retrospective safety checks.
3
Domain 3: Servant Leadership and Self-Organization
3 topics
Servant leadership deepening
- Apply servant leadership principles to create environments where team members feel empowered to make decisions, take risks, and learn from failures without fear of blame.
- Analyze the tension between servant leadership and traditional management hierarchies to determine strategies for influencing managers to support team autonomy and self-management.
- Design leadership development opportunities for team members that distribute leadership responsibilities and reduce single-point-of-failure dependency on the ScrumMaster.
Team self-management advancement
- Apply Tuckman's stages of group development to assess team maturity and adjust ScrumMaster interventions appropriate to forming, storming, norming, and performing phases.
- Analyze team self-management maturity by evaluating decision-making autonomy, cross-functional skill coverage, and the team's ability to resolve internal impediments without external intervention.
- Design progressive delegation strategies that gradually increase team decision-making authority as competence and trust develop, avoiding both premature autonomy and prolonged dependence.
Stakeholder relationship management
- Apply stakeholder mapping techniques to identify key influencers, decision-makers, and affected parties, determining appropriate engagement strategies for each stakeholder group.
- Analyze stakeholder expectations and concerns to identify misalignments between what stakeholders expect from Scrum and what the framework actually delivers, preventing disappointment.
4
Domain 4: Organizational Impediment Resolution
4 topics
Systemic impediment identification
- Apply root cause analysis techniques such as the five whys and fishbone diagrams to trace team-level symptoms to underlying organizational impediments including policies, structures, and cultural norms.
- Analyze impediment patterns across multiple Sprints to distinguish recurring systemic issues from one-time blockers and prioritize impediment resolution by impact on team delivery.
- Design an impediment tracking and escalation system that makes organizational blockers visible to leadership while preserving team psychological safety and avoiding blame attribution.
Organizational change and influence
- Apply influence-without-authority techniques to advocate for organizational changes that support Scrum adoption, including engaging sponsors, building coalitions, and demonstrating value through team outcomes.
- Analyze organizational resistance to agile adoption by identifying stakeholder concerns, cultural barriers, and structural constraints that impede Scrum implementation.
- Design organizational change strategies using frameworks such as Kotter's eight steps to create urgency, build guiding coalitions, and sustain momentum for agile transformation.
Navigating resistance to change
- Apply empathy-based engagement techniques to understand and address the fears, concerns, and motivations of individuals and groups resistant to Scrum and agile practices.
- Analyze the Satir change model stages to predict team and organizational responses during transitions and determine appropriate support interventions for each stage.
Evidence-based management
- Apply evidence-based management metrics including current value, unrealized value, ability to innovate, and time to market to demonstrate the impact of Scrum adoption to organizational leaders.
- Analyze the relationship between team-level Scrum metrics and organizational outcomes to build compelling cases for continued investment in agile transformation.
5
Domain 5: Scaling Scrum
3 topics
Multi-team coordination
- Apply cross-team coordination techniques including Scrum of Scrums, shared backlogs, and integration cadences to manage dependencies between multiple Scrum teams working on a shared product.
- Analyze dependency patterns between multiple Scrum teams to identify bottlenecks, shared component conflicts, and integration risks that threaten multi-team delivery.
- Design team-of-teams coordination structures that maintain individual team autonomy while ensuring alignment on shared Product Goals and minimizing cross-team dependencies.
Scaling framework awareness
- Apply knowledge of scaling frameworks including Nexus, LeSS, and Scrum@Scale to evaluate their core principles, structures, and applicability to different organizational contexts and product complexities.
- Analyze organizational readiness for scaling by evaluating team maturity, infrastructure capability, stakeholder alignment, and existing process maturity before recommending a scaling approach.
- Design a scaling readiness assessment that evaluates prerequisites including single-team Scrum proficiency, Definition of Done consistency, and technical infrastructure before scaling.
Shared Definition of Done at scale
- Apply shared Definition of Done practices across multiple Scrum teams to ensure consistent quality standards and integration compatibility for a shared product.
- Analyze integration challenges when multiple teams contribute to the same product, identifying technical and process impediments to delivering a unified, releasable Increment.
- Design cross-team integration strategies including shared Sprint Reviews, integration Sprints, and continuous integration practices that maintain product coherence at scale.
6
Domain 6: Product Goal and Backlog Excellence
3 topics
Product Goal refinement
- Apply techniques for collaboratively refining the Product Goal with the Scrum Team and stakeholders to ensure alignment between business objectives, user needs, and team capacity.
- Analyze Product Goal clarity and measurability to determine whether the goal provides sufficient direction for the team while maintaining flexibility for empirical discovery.
Advanced backlog management
- Apply backlog structuring techniques including story mapping, impact mapping, and outcome-based ordering to create a Product Backlog that supports strategic Product Goal achievement.
- Analyze backlog health across multiple dimensions including item freshness, refinement coverage, dependency clarity, and alignment to the Product Goal to recommend management improvements.
- Design a backlog refinement cadence and facilitation approach that engages Developers, Product Owner, and stakeholders effectively while minimizing meeting overhead.
Stakeholder alignment on product direction
- Apply facilitation techniques to help the Product Owner navigate competing stakeholder priorities and reach consensus on Product Backlog ordering that maximizes overall value delivery.
- Analyze the impact of stakeholder misalignment on team effectiveness, identifying symptoms such as frequent backlog reordering, scope churn, and conflicting acceptance criteria.
7
Domain 7: ScrumMaster Professional Development
3 topics
Personal growth and reflection
- Apply reflective practice techniques including journaling, peer feedback, and self-assessment to continuously evaluate and improve personal ScrumMaster effectiveness.
- Analyze personal strengths and development areas across the ScrumMaster competency domains of facilitation, coaching, teaching, mentoring, and organizational change.
- Design a personal development plan that targets specific ScrumMaster competency gaps with measurable learning goals, practice opportunities, and feedback mechanisms.
Community of practice engagement
- Apply community of practice principles to establish or participate in ScrumMaster peer groups that share knowledge, experiences, and emerging practices across organizational boundaries.
- Design knowledge-sharing mechanisms including internal conferences, brown-bag sessions, and coaching circles that accelerate ScrumMaster capability development across the organization.
Lean and systems thinking
- Apply Lean principles including elimination of waste, flow optimization, and pull-based work management to complement Scrum practices and improve team delivery efficiency.
- Analyze team workflow using systems thinking to identify feedback loops, bottlenecks, and unintended consequences of process changes within and beyond the Scrum team boundary.
- Design workflow optimization experiments using Lean metrics such as cycle time, lead time, and throughput to test hypotheses about process improvements in a controlled manner.
Scope
Included Topics
- All topics in the Scrum Alliance Advanced Certified ScrumMaster (A-CSM) learning objectives: advanced facilitation, coaching fundamentals, organizational change, servant leadership deepening, scaling Scrum, and team performance optimization.
- Advanced facilitation techniques including designing collaborative events, applying strategies to resolve communication obstacles, and creating working agreements that foster high-performing teamwork.
- Coaching and mentoring skills including coaching stances (teaching, mentoring, facilitating, coaching), active listening, powerful questioning, and helping individuals and teams discover solutions independently.
- Organizational impediment resolution including root cause analysis of systemic blockers, strategies for influencing organizational change, and navigating resistance to Scrum and agile adoption.
- Scaling Scrum concepts including coordination across multiple Scrum teams, managing dependencies, and awareness of scaling frameworks such as Nexus, LeSS, and Scrum@Scale.
- Product Goal refinement with the Scrum Team and stakeholders, and creating a Product Backlog that supports the achievement of a Product Goal across complex delivery environments.
Not Covered
- Foundational Scrum framework knowledge covered comprehensively by the CSM certification including basic definitions of events, artifacts, and accountabilities.
- Enterprise-level coaching and organizational transformation strategies covered by the CSP-SM, CTC, and CEC certifications.
- Technical engineering practices including TDD, CI/CD, refactoring, and architecture decisions covered by the Developer track.
- Product strategy, product vision creation, business model analysis, and advanced prioritization techniques covered by the Product Owner track.
- Specific tool configurations or platform administration for agile project management software.
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