CSP-SM
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CSP-SM
The CSP‑SM certification deepens a Scrum Master’s expertise in Lean systems thinking, advanced coaching, organizational agility, sophisticated Scrum practice, and evidence‑based metrics, enabling strategic leadership of complex agile transformations.
Who Should Take This
Experienced Scrum Masters who have earned the A‑CSM and have at least three years of leading cross‑functional agile teams should pursue CSP‑SM. They aim to master high‑impact coaching, data‑driven improvement, and enterprise‑wide agility to drive measurable outcomes and influence organizational strategy.
What's Covered
1
Domain 1: Lean and Systems Thinking Mastery
2
Domain 2: Advanced Coaching and Mentoring
3
Domain 3: Organizational Agility
4
Domain 4: Advanced Scrum Practice
5
Domain 5: Agile Metrics and Evidence-Based Management
6
Domain 6: Professional Excellence and Community
What's Included in AccelaStudy® AI
Adaptive Knowledge Graph
Practice Questions
Lesson Modules
Console Simulator Labs
Exam Tips & Strategy
20 Activity Formats
Course Outline
64 learning goals
1
Domain 1: Lean and Systems Thinking Mastery
3 topics
Lean principles in knowledge work
- Apply value stream mapping to knowledge work delivery pipelines, identifying value-adding steps, wait states, and handoffs that create waste in the team's workflow.
- Apply work-in-progress limit strategies to optimize flow and reduce context switching, establishing and adjusting WIP limits based on team capacity and throughput data.
- Analyze the eight wastes of Lean adapted for knowledge work to systematically identify and prioritize waste reduction opportunities across the development value stream.
- Design pull-based workflow systems that complement Scrum's Sprint cadence, optimizing the balance between Sprint commitment and continuous flow within and between events.
Systems thinking application
- Apply systems thinking principles to map feedback loops, delays, and leverage points within the organizational system that affect Scrum team performance and delivery outcomes.
- Analyze unintended consequences of process changes by tracing second-order effects through organizational systems, preventing improvement initiatives that create new problems.
- Design systemic interventions that address root causes rather than symptoms, targeting leverage points in organizational structures, policies, and incentive systems.
Theory of Constraints application
- Apply Theory of Constraints principles to identify the current bottleneck in the delivery pipeline and focus improvement efforts on the constraint before optimizing elsewhere.
- Analyze delivery pipeline throughput to locate the constraining step and evaluate whether the constraint is a policy, skill, tool, or structural limitation.
- Design constraint exploitation and elevation strategies that maximize flow through the bottleneck before investing in additional capacity or structural changes.
2
Domain 2: Advanced Coaching and Mentoring
4 topics
Professional coaching competence
- Apply professional coaching competencies including establishing trust, active listening, powerful questioning, and creating awareness to support individual and team development.
- Apply solution-focused coaching techniques to help individuals reframe challenges as opportunities and identify their own strengths and resources for overcoming obstacles.
- Analyze coaching relationship dynamics including transference, dependence, and resistance to maintain appropriate professional boundaries and coaching effectiveness.
- Design coaching engagement structures with clear contracting, goals, success measures, and review cadences for both individual coaching and team coaching relationships.
Mentoring ScrumMasters
- Apply mentoring practices to develop junior ScrumMasters, sharing experience-based insights about common challenges, proven techniques, and professional growth pathways.
- Analyze the developmental needs of ScrumMasters at different experience levels to create personalized growth plans addressing specific competency gaps.
- Design a ScrumMaster community of practice with structured mentoring, peer coaching, and knowledge-sharing mechanisms that accelerate collective professional development.
Training and teaching effectiveness
- Apply adult learning principles including experiential learning, constructivism, and varied modalities to design effective Scrum training sessions for diverse audiences.
- Analyze learning outcomes and knowledge retention from training sessions using participant feedback, behavioral observation, and performance metrics to improve future training design.
Coaching teams through dysfunction
- Apply Lencioni's five dysfunctions of a team model to diagnose team health issues including absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results.
- Analyze team health assessment data from retrospectives, surveys, and behavioral observations to prioritize coaching interventions that address the most foundational dysfunction first.
- Design team health improvement programs with phased interventions, measurable indicators, and accountability structures that rebuild trust and collaborative effectiveness.
3
Domain 3: Organizational Agility
4 topics
Organizational design for agility
- Apply organizational design principles to evaluate and recommend team structures, reporting lines, and governance models that support cross-functional, self-managing Scrum teams.
- Analyze organizational structures for agility impediments including functional silos, approval hierarchies, and resource sharing models that hinder Scrum team autonomy.
- Design organizational restructuring proposals that align team boundaries with product boundaries, minimize cross-team dependencies, and maximize team autonomy and ownership.
Cultural transformation
- Apply cultural assessment models to evaluate organizational readiness for agile transformation, identifying cultural strengths to leverage and barriers to address.
- Analyze the relationship between organizational culture, leadership behavior, and agile adoption success to identify the most impactful cultural transformation levers.
- Design cultural transformation initiatives that shift organizational mindsets from command-and-control to empirical, collaborative, and value-driven approaches over sustainable timelines.
Leadership coaching
- Apply coaching techniques to help organizational leaders understand their role in supporting Scrum teams, including removing systemic impediments and modeling agile behaviors.
- Analyze leadership behaviors that undermine Scrum adoption including micromanagement, blame culture, and reward systems misaligned with agile values, and determine coaching approaches.
- Design leadership development programs that help managers transition from directive to supportive leadership styles aligned with servant leadership and agile principles.
HR and performance management alignment
- Apply agile-aligned performance management practices that evaluate team contributions, learning growth, and collaboration quality rather than individual output metrics alone.
- Analyze the impact of traditional performance review systems on Scrum team dynamics to identify incentive misalignments that undermine collaboration and self-management.
- Design recommendations for HR policy evolution that supports agile team structures including career paths, compensation models, and recognition systems aligned with Scrum values.
4
Domain 4: Advanced Scrum Practice
4 topics
Complex product delivery
- Apply advanced Sprint Planning facilitation techniques for teams working with high-uncertainty requirements, complex technical landscapes, and evolving Definition of Done criteria.
- Apply techniques for managing technical debt within Scrum including making technical debt visible in the Product Backlog, negotiating capacity allocation, and tracking debt reduction progress.
- Analyze delivery patterns across multiple Sprints to identify systemic quality, estimation, or process issues that prevent consistent Increment delivery.
- Design continuous improvement experiments using the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle to test process hypotheses and measure their impact on team delivery effectiveness.
Multi-team Scrum mastery
- Apply multi-team coordination practices including Nexus, LeSS, and Scrum@Scale to facilitate delivery across multiple Scrum teams sharing a single product.
- Analyze cross-team dependency management effectiveness by evaluating integration frequency, shared Definition of Done adherence, and Increment coherence across teams.
- Design scaling approaches tailored to organizational context, balancing team autonomy with alignment needs and selecting coordination mechanisms based on product complexity.
Scrum event mastery
- Apply advanced retrospective formats including timeline retrospectives, sailboat, and DAKI to keep continuous improvement engaging and effective across long-running teams.
- Analyze Sprint Review effectiveness by evaluating stakeholder engagement quality, feedback actionability, and the degree to which Reviews drive Product Backlog adaptation.
- Design event facilitation strategies for mature teams that evolve event formats, participant responsibilities, and outcomes as the team progresses beyond basic Scrum adoption.
DevOps and continuous delivery facilitation
- Apply understanding of DevOps principles to facilitate collaboration between Developers and operations teams, supporting continuous integration and deployment pipeline improvements.
- Analyze the relationship between deployment frequency, lead time for changes, and team confidence to identify technical practices that improve delivery reliability.
5
Domain 5: Agile Metrics and Evidence-Based Management
4 topics
Flow metrics mastery
- Apply flow metrics including cycle time, lead time, throughput, and work item age to diagnose workflow efficiency and predict delivery timelines with empirical data.
- Analyze flow metric trends to identify process bottlenecks, policy constraints, and capacity imbalances that degrade delivery predictability and team performance.
- Design probabilistic forecasting approaches using flow data and Monte Carlo simulation to provide stakeholders with confidence-interval-based delivery predictions.
Evidence-based management
- Apply evidence-based management framework metrics across four key value areas: current value, unrealized value, ability to innovate, and time to market.
- Analyze the relationship between team-level metrics and organizational outcomes to build compelling cases for investment in agile practices and team capacity.
- Design organizational measurement frameworks that balance leading and lagging indicators, avoiding vanity metrics while promoting transparency and data-driven decision making.
Outcome-based measures
- Apply outcome-based success measures that focus on customer value delivered and business impact rather than output volume, velocity, or story points completed.
- Analyze the misuse of agile metrics including velocity as a performance measure, story points for comparison between teams, and burndown charts as management reporting tools.
Quality and sustainability metrics
- Apply quality metrics including escaped defect rates, technical debt ratios, and test coverage trends to make quality visible and facilitate informed tradeoff discussions.
- Analyze sustainability indicators including team happiness surveys, overtime patterns, and knowledge distribution to detect early warning signs of burnout and unsustainable pace.
- Design team health dashboards that integrate delivery metrics, quality indicators, and sustainability measures to provide a balanced view of team performance for stakeholders.
6
Domain 6: Professional Excellence and Community
3 topics
Professional mastery development
- Apply deliberate practice principles to continuously deepen ScrumMaster competencies across facilitation, coaching, mentoring, teaching, and organizational change domains.
- Analyze personal coaching and facilitation effectiveness through structured reflection, peer observation, and participant feedback to identify mastery development priorities.
- Design a professional development roadmap that integrates formal learning, practical application, mentoring relationships, and community contribution for sustained growth.
Community contribution and thought leadership
- Apply knowledge-sharing practices to contribute insights, case studies, and lessons learned to the broader agile practitioner community through conferences, articles, and workshops.
- Design organizational learning initiatives that capture, codify, and disseminate agile practice knowledge across teams and departments to accelerate enterprise agile maturity.
Ethical agile practice
- Apply ethical decision-making frameworks to navigate situations where organizational pressure conflicts with agile values, team wellbeing, or professional integrity.
- Analyze the impact of agile adoption on workforce dynamics including job security concerns, skill obsolescence fears, and power redistribution to ensure ethical transformation practices.
Scope
Included Topics
- All topics in the Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Professional ScrumMaster (CSP-SM) learning objectives: mastery-level facilitation, coaching, mentoring, and training of Scrum teams and organizations.
- Lean thinking integration with Scrum including value stream mapping, flow optimization, work-in-progress limits, and waste elimination applied to knowledge work delivery.
- Systemic approaches for Scrum adoption including organizational design, cultural transformation, leadership coaching, and sustainable agile practices at the enterprise level.
- Advanced product management support including multi-team backlog management, Product Goal alignment across complex product portfolios, and stakeholder ecosystem management.
- Agile metrics mastery including evidence-based management, flow metrics, outcome-based measures, and data-driven decision making for continuous organizational improvement.
- Professional ScrumMaster community building, mentorship of junior ScrumMasters, and contribution to the broader agile practitioner community.
Not Covered
- Foundational and intermediate Scrum framework knowledge covered by CSM and A-CSM certifications.
- Enterprise coaching and transformation leadership at the CEC certification level including multi-year transformation roadmaps.
- Technical engineering practices, architecture decisions, and software craftsmanship covered by the Developer track.
- Product strategy, business model canvas, competitive analysis, and advanced product discovery techniques covered by the CSP-PO track.
- Specific scaling framework implementation details beyond their relevance to ScrumMaster professional practice.
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