​Case Study:
 
Our family relocated to UK during Christmas time in 2018.  My daughter went to a local community school with a Ofsted Good rating in St. Johns wood area  for her primary education from Jan 2019.  The school was very supportive during Covid 19 lock down with online homework and later on moved to TEAMS class. She did not attend any extra English class but keeps learning piano via private tutoring.
 
In March 2020,  I started to get serious about her secondary school admission process.
There are different schools type you can find with the link below:
 
https://www.goodschoolsguide.co.uk/choosing-a-school/state-schools/secondary-school-admissions
 
In this article, I would like to share my personal experience as a parents for children who speaks English as a second language but manged to get in the school she love.
 
Which school to apply?
I went for the rules to apply:
 

• 2 top end exceeding her English verbal capability schools: one grammar and one independent school.- This is for her to understand there are many smart and hardworking kids who she may not met before.
• 2 Aptitude/Talent-the schools  - school had intake by aptitude (music , performance art) with Ofsted Outstanding rating. -This is where I think she potentially can get in  to receive high quality education  at the same time to maximise the tax we paid.
• 3- base on distance, sibling but with Ofsted Good rating.- this gives us security knowing she has a place to study with relatively good education.

 
The preparation for admission test:
We  need to buffer 2-3 assessment per school and check out the exam and interview time.
 

• We went through verbal (her weak one) and non verbal (her strong one with logical)   11+ Bond exam papers. Also some grammar school has sample questions on their website we had downloaded.  She loves doing non verbal but refused to finish verbal (English). I can see this was not good for grammar and independent school applications. However, still ask her to do a few during July-Aug 2020.
• With the aptitude test preparation.  It’s a stressful process at least for me. Firstly my daughter refused to have more piano lessons from  June and July as she felt high pressure from her piano tutor, she even wrote about her stressfulness in her school work and the school teacher had a conversation with me. So instead, I became her private music teacher.  I did some music aptitude test preparation with her. We focus on pitch, texture, rhythm and melody practice. The piano teacher told me to buy the text sample but instead I just google YouTube and play the cords in my own music theory book to mimic the test. At the end, it was sufficient for her to get reasonable good ranking.
• As for the music exam, ideally your kid shall know two instruments, but given my daughter only learn piano. We choose two contrast pieces instead (one from Sonata one from Bach’s miniature). Although she did not get selected on the first run, she was on the waiting list for aptitude results. This also path a good foundation with school’s music head teacher if she gets in.
• Band test- just go and do. She got into A easy. But I suppose the non verbal exercise she did helped. She told me some school exams had similar questions come up. So practice if you can.

 
Result for admission:
At first my daughter got into an good school and was on waiting list for music aptitude excellent school. We accepted the good school first but keep her on the waiting list for the other. After 1-2 months, I received a phone call from local council if she would like to go for the aptitude school. The staff told me if she accepted the position, she will be the first one live so far out of the zone in the last 14 years she had been working with the council. I was so excited and cannot believe it was true and ask her to send me an email after thank you her.
 
 
After school starts:
My daughter and one of the other smartest girl in her primary school got into the same secondary school. I told her she is very fortunately to study with the smartest girl who run out of books to ready in the local library. They soon became closer than before. She also met a new friend who lives far but got in with the music aptitude test. Apparently her mother is a music teacher. This smart girl can play three instruments with Grade 8 in Piano.
My daughter loves design technology club, trampolining club, skateboarding in PE. Skipping her classes to attend drum and piano tutoring in her school. I think she is a much happier girl after all the hard work to get into the school as her first choice.

• Recently I have been asked by our people and business partner about what are the top 5 attributes in my experience that make a good PD.  This is a self reflection I would like to share.

1. Strong Leadership Skills:

• Need to apply situational leadership and being a quick adapter to different program challenge environment. Confident to work with C-levels but being humble to ask for support as needed. Not every PD has the full profile to play both Contract Fulfillment Responsible (CFR) and Contract Solution Responsible (CSR) roles. Therefore, it is important to know your weakness and find the right A-team to bring the best out of program.

2. Strong Stakeholder management/ Effective communications skill:

• A PD spends most of his/her time as a communicator to connect with people at all levels and therefore strong  internal and external key stakeholders management is essential.
• At times, applying data analysis skills and presentation skills to trouble shoot an issue and recover a program is needed. For example, a PD need to have information on  all his/her 100+ resources in the team and drew into details to track what each resources are doing and if the resources are working in a efficient way. However, towards to management team, a PD needs to be able to present the information in a consolidated/high level view. Also bring the key message across in a short time in order to gain leadership teams' support to move forward.

3. Take ownership:

• A PD needs to take ownership and be courageous to present your company in front of customer. Even at time to take blame for the mistake the team made without your involvement in the past. A PD shall always act professional to gain customer trust.

4. Consultation sales skills/ Know your numbers:

• A PD needs to know his/her numbers and also understands customer's pain point in order to be the right partner with the customer. Typically a 3-5 years business plan view is needed from strategic point of view. 

5. Inspires a shared vision and take new approached:

• Most time, a PD needs to do drive transformation and change management in the program. To make this success, PD needs to bring new ways of working into the program. This is not limited to tool and process but can be a organisational culture change and influence both internal and external customer mindset shifts. For example, to  bring automation and  DevOps in to program, it requires top management's buy in to support the initial investment and engineers' support to give up current ways of working. The PD needs to share his/her vision and be transparent about the challenges ahead.

After passing the Professional Scrum Master I (#PSM I ) certification last year, I was so pleased my company Ericsson is encouraging the employee with Program Director role to  study #SAFe and get Certified as a #SAFe® Agilist.
The first step was I attended a two days training called Leading SAFe® 5 course delivered in our office site by a company called #Netmind (www.netmind.es).
The course content was structured the same way to cover all 6 sessions in the exam topics on in rough portion to the exam question percentage:

• SECTION 1: Thriving in the Digital Age with Business Agility 13%
• SECTION 2: Becoming a Lean-Agile Leader 29%
• SECTION 3: Establishing Team and Technical Agility 9%
• SECTION 4: Building Solutions with Agile Product Delivery 33%
• SECTION 5: Exploring Lean Portfolio Management 11%
• SECTION 6: Leading the Change 4%

Believe it or not, the course was pretty intensed, after half a day my brain already started to fill with all unknown acronym like Agile Release Trains (#ARTs), Program Increment (#PI) Planning, Release Train Engineers (#RTEs), Epic Owners, SAFe-House of Lean, SAFe Lean-Agile Principles etc.
Then I understood, this two days course is JUST THE BEGINNING! I will have loads to study to follow up with all SAFe framewrok and these Lean-Agile principles. And I meant to take the exam 30 days after attending these two day courses.
The exam SAFe 5 Agilist Exam are in a format Multiple choice, 45 questions are randomized, can skip questions and answer later Exam question format and you have 90 minutes (1.5 hours) to complete the exam. To pass the exam, you need to get 35 out of 45 (77%). The first exam attempt is included as part of the course registration fee if the exam is taken within 30 days of course completion, but after study I understood it can also be extended 2 weeks as a grace period.
After returning from training with my day job to do, I had managed only to spent less than 1 hour study on weekdays. So most of my study was done on Saturday or Sunday mornings on average 1.5-2 hours per weekend.
I also tried three times of the monk exams. I got 62%-> 67% then on the first two round. Then I decided to take notes and re-study the one I did not get right before my third attempt. Finally I got 87% on the 3rd attempt on my third week of self study. I was planning to keep practicing the mock exam till I got 90% but I did not have this option.
 
I decided to get my exam done when I was taking an annual leave on a Tuesday. This was one day after the 30 days period when the grace period of 2 weeks actually automatically kick in. I was so relieved when I passed the test. Although only very few questions appeared in the mock, my exam score was exactly 87% again. So I suppose if you follow the study guide you would be pretty much covered.
 
Below is a snapshot of links you may want to go through even before taking the training.
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/implementation-roadmap/
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/business-agility/
http://www.scaledagileframework.com /lean-agile-leadership/
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/organize-around-value/
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/safe-core-values/
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/lean-agile-mindset/
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/safe-lean-agile-principles/
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/assume-variability-preserve-options/
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/visualize-and-limit-wip-reduce-batch-sizes-and-managequeue-lengths/
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/apply-cadence-synchronize-with-cross-domain-planning/
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/unlock-the-intrinsic-motivation-of-knowledge-workers/
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/decentralize-decision-making/
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/business-owners/
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/customer-centricity/
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/design-thinking/
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/continuous-integ
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/Portfolio-SAFe/
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/value-streams/
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/strategic-themes/
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/guardrails/  
 
I hope you find this information useful and best of luck with your study!

Last October, my college, #Krisman Oppusunggu introduced me to #scrum.
He spent first 30 mins session to tell me about the scrumorg.com. He highlighted the scrum guide's main concepts including the definition of scrum, the scrum team, drum vents and scrum artifacts.
At the time I was working on a critical project. But I decided to  I read through the scrum guide during my spare time. A few weeks later, we met again and he taught me more about the how to prepare for the PSMI certification exam. Although there are some group classes in Japan, I could not find one that I can join alone. Fortunately, Kriman introduced me to take some online training through
https://unbored.training
I bought The Scrum Framework course to study on weekends first.
Then I bought Scrum Master Exam Simulator which validated for one year. It allowed me to review the questions within a month.
As you can see from my score below. Its better to study within a month and try to do the exam. If you leave it for awhile, it is hard to keep at a good score level.
2019-06-21 05:32:3589%Review
2019-06-21 05:01:1074%Review
2019-06-13 13:21:4383%Review
2018-12-31 08:16:3491%
2018-12-29 08:10:2489%
2018-12-29 06:09:5091%
2018-12-28 08:35:4488%
2018-12-25 07:00:4086%
2018-12-06 08:11:1993%
2018-12-04 07:26:2183%
2018-12-04 05:36:2473%
2018-11-30 05:53:2178%
2018-11-30 05:00:2369%
2018-11-28 05:10:1468%
2018-11-26 07:03:3649%

Since I was in the transition of settling to UK in last December, I didn’t manage to do the exam straight away.

In May 2019, I had the opportunity to do a two days on site training course with Xecofy in our company. The training gave me an opportunity to do an agile delivery    through lego simulation. It helped me to get deeper understanding of the scrum guide.
My other colleagues also  introduced me to other free resources for PSMI exam simulation and free online study materials at websites such as Volkerdon, https://mlapshin.com/index.php/scrum-quizzes/,  and techagilisti.com.

One of my colleagues told me he had to study till 1am and continued for 6 hours before the exam. The other one told me that he woke up at 6am to study for a few days before the exam.
I started to feel a bit guilty and I woke up at 4am on Friday to study before starting work and read through https://www.volkerdon.com/pages/agile-glossary.
The following day at 6:30am on Saturday , I reviewed the questions which I did wrong in the simulation. Then took the actual exam. I was so glad that I passed with the score 95% which is even better then my simulation results in Scrum Master Exam Simulator .

Thanks to all my colleagues who had helped me with my study!