Ouch!
June 11, 2007 by Simon Baker
Anyone read Scott Ambler’s article Coming Soon: Agile Certification. He says “certification of agile practitioners is already here”. And he’s got some scathing words about the Scrum Alliance and it’s Certified Scrum Master programme.
I don’t want to be certified and I don’t believe that I need to be certified. I would much rather you sit down with me and we talk some. Then you can decide if I’m trustworthy and actually know what I’m talking about and possess real experience, or that I’m full of it. Give me a trial if you’re still unsure. But don’t try to pigeon-hole me with certification. And if your recruitment is influenced heavily by certification then I don’t want to work with you anyway.
I’m on the fence as far as the Scrum Alliance goes. It seems to be more successful within its community than the Agile Alliance and I’m wondering if this is down to its increasing commercialisation. What I don’t like about the Scrum Alliance is the fact that the Scrum Master training is price-fixed. A nice little cartel going on there. So I will pay the same rate for a less experienced or poor trainer as I would for a very experienced and effective trainer. What happened to healthy competition?
I am afraid it’s the way the industry is going. I quite liked the DSDM certification process as it required a course (with no exam), then a write up and finally an interview with the write up and the interview based on real project experience. I was dismayed to see that the oddly named Atern certification programme is now run by APM with what I assume to be a multi guess exam at the end give the those with good memories a foundation certificate. To be honest the courses aren’t about showing any particular capability, they are simply about getting people passed the exam at the end. I think certification programmes should be less about exams and more competency based - at least that should give employers confidence!
Not sure why Scott has got his knickers in such a twist over CSM.
The term “Certified SCRUM Master” is itself disingenuous, but it’s certainly a lot more fun than “2 Day Introductory Course to an Agile Project Management Technique”. I doubt that the SCRUM Alliance named it thus to deliberately mislead - and to insinuate otherwise and call it a deception isn’t giving them the benefit of the doubt. Now that SCRUM has become more mainstream, I do agree it is a rather clumsy name for the 2 day course.
However, with all Training, Certifications and Qualifications it really has to be a case of “Buyer Beware”. The SCRUM Alliance have made no secret of what the CSM programme consists of, and any potential hirer has to make their own value judgement not only about the worth of the course/certification/whatever but also the body “awarding” or presenting it. I do agree about the price fixing element - but hey - nothing to stop you setting up your own *Alliance and dishing out certificates for £100 a pop!
Disclosure: I am a CSM.
As far as I can tell, the big problem with the phrase “Certfied Scrum Master” is the punctuation. My understanding is that it means “certified as a master of Scrums”, which is to say, someone who knows how to facilitate (NB, not “lead”, not “manage”
the various kinds of management activites that go on in a Scrum project. That’s why I go so far as to reccommend that some of my clients put some of their people through CSM–but not developers, and not project managers; instead, people with titles like “Project Support Officer”. These I then seek to put in charge of helping development teams maintain their planning and tracking and reporting disciplines.
Is CSM a laughably easy certification to obtain? Yes. Is the standard (and even content) of CSM courses widely variable? Yes. Is even so compromised a thing very useful in calming the fears of highly tradionally minded managers when faced with this amorphous “Agile” thing? Yes.
What would it take for an “Agile Certification” to be a serious, seriously useful thing? In my view 1) if you screw up, you lose the certification 2) if you don’t screw up but you get blamed for something anyway the certifying body acts like a union and sends in some serious lawyers 3) having the certification means that you have some pretty hefty indemnity (including non-completion) for the work that you do. This is pretty much what, say, RIBA does for architects.
This would, respectively: (1) paralyse IT industry so-called “professionals” with fear, (2) result in clients not letting you on site, (3) mean that the certifying body would need a huge amount of disclosure as to what you were doing (so see (1) and (2)). In short, the IT industry, buyers and vendors of product and service all simply isn’t ready for the kinds of certification that really makes a difference.
And I thought you were a Certified Scrum Practitioner - must be another Simon Baker I’m thinking of
Now to risk being shot down as one possible approach to this is to follow the example of Prince 2 where the 2 day introductory course teaches the methodology and tests understanding of the methodology, leading to a Foundation qualification. There then follows a Practitioner exam which is designed to prove that the candidate can apply the methodology appropriately in a number of different scenarios. Although not currently the case for Prince 2, this could then lead to a “Master” qualification based on proven experience and assessed by a group of “Masters”.
I must say however that I am merely suggesting this as an approach rather than endorsing it.
In my view, certification - unless re-assessed regularly - is no better than a degree. It proves you knew something at the time but may not have practised it in years. Also, there are plenty of people I have come across who have degrees that I would not have on my team in a month of Sundays but plenty of people without who I would jump at the chance to work with again. And it’s the same with certifications as there will always be people who use any certification process as an educational experience and those who use it merely to try and make more money for themselves. This is not a problem with any certification method, but a problem of human nature itself.
This leads me to sit firmly on the fence regarding certification per se as to me, the motivation of the person seeking certification is more important than the certification itself, and any employer basing recruitment decisions on certification or degrees needs to be very confident that they fully understand the implications of their approach.
Regards the comment ‘I was dismayed to see that the oddly named Atern certification programme is now run by APM’… errr, thats not true. They are not running certification; the DSDM Consortium are. Definite, 100% =)