CASM study guide
CASM · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Certified Agile Service Manager (CASM) credential is aimed at people who own or improve IT service management work: service managers, process owners, team leads, Scrum Masters, and practitioners moving from traditional ITSM toward Lean, Agile, and DevOps ways of working. It tests whether you can connect service management fundamentals to flow-based delivery rather than treat them as opposing worlds. The CASM study guide has 10 sections and about 4,170 words.
01Agile and Lean Service Management Fundamentals
Agile and Lean are the two intellectual roots of Agile Service Management, and this domain tests whether you can apply their principles to a service context rather than recite them. The Agile Manifesto's four values favour individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration and responding to change over their counterparts - while the statement insists the right-hand items still have value.
468 words, about 2 min02The Agile Service Management Journey and Organizational Readiness
This domain tests whether you can sequence an Agile Service Management adoption realistically and evidence readiness rather than assert it. Adoption moves through recognisable stages: build the case and vision, baseline the current state, run a bounded pilot, expand by value stream or team, then embed and continuously improve.
440 words, about 2 min03Service Design and Agile Requirements Definition
This domain tests requirement formats and, more importantly, whether a requirement can actually fail a test. Agile requirements are conversations made durable by acceptance criteria, refined just in time.
394 words, about 2 min04Agile Service Transition and Deployment Practices
This domain tests how changes reach production safely and repeatedly, and whether you understand that deployment and release are separate decisions. Deployment is putting an artifact into an environment; release is making functionality available to users.
430 words, about 2 min05Value Stream Mapping and Continuous Improvement
This domain tests whether you can map how work actually flows to a customer, quantify the delay, and target improvement at the constraint. A value stream map shows process steps as boxes, queues as triangles, information flow, and a timeline ladder along the bottom separating process time (top) from wait time (bottom).
410 words, about 2 min06Kanban, Scrum, and Flow-Based Work Management for Service Teams
This domain tests whether you can choose between cadence-based and flow-based work management, and use flow arithmetic to justify decisions. Visualise the workflow, limit work in progress, manage flow, make policies explicit, implement feedback loops, improve collaboratively.
417 words, about 2 min07DevOps Culture, Collaboration, and Automation
This domain tests the DevOps mindset and specific automation practice, and whether you can tell culture change apart from tool acquisition. CALMS: Culture (shared ownership of outcomes rather than handoffs), Automation (repeatable, versioned, tested), Lean (small batches, flow, limited WIP), Measurement (evidence and feedback), Sharing (knowledge and blameless learning).
388 words, about 2 min08Metrics, Measurement, and Reporting for Agile Service Management
This domain tests metric selection, calculation and interpretation, including the discipline to reject averages that mislead. Lead time: request (or commitment point) to delivery.
378 words, about 2 min09Governance, Risk, and Compliance in Agile Service Delivery
This domain tests whether you can design controls that provide assurance without serialising delivery. Governance means decision rights plus the controls that evidence they were exercised - not a committee that approves everything.
421 words, about 2 min10Change Enablement and Organizational Transformation
This domain has two halves: making change safe and fast, and making the organisational shift stick. Change enablement addresses the first; change management in the people sense addresses the second.
424 words, about 2 min