Friday 5 August 2011

I just got Scrum Certified.. am I still Rogue enough?

Recently, I sat through a two day Professional Scrum Master Training (lead by Richard Banks, Thanks R) and I could not help but jot a thousand little notes on all the gaps I had not covered in my past efforts at moving teams to follow agile practices using Agile Unified Process and a lot of what I learnt from Craig Larman, Mike Cohn and Scott Ambler. When I was trying to get teams to move to agile, I often felt challenged, confrontational, stealthy, manipulative, political, diplomatic... all with a noble aim of achieving true efficiency (by shaking up the system, getting people to collaborate and apply common sense).

Now I am Scrum Certified. I'm armed with tools to go out and officially be agile. Suddenly I can see every person in the mega organisation clambering to get this certification, since someone is going to kill Waterfall (if not me). Everyone will want to be "agile" and the status quo, without a doubt, will change.

So now what? I wonder if I am simply addicted to being 'Rogue' (an agent of change) or is there some empowering force that is going to make me settle down and feel like the we have all managed to vote for the same government and we should be happy in this new world.

Mike Cottmeyer wrote Having Your Cake… Some Thoughts Around Scrum Certification

Scrum can’t have it’s cake and eat it too. It can’t be a simple framework that is not prescriptive and then start certifying people on how to do all this stuff.
But some day very very soon, the new army of certified agile people will turn it into a "process", and then someone will need to go rogue again and re-label everything to help others unlearn. Then there will be a new training, a certification and so on.. the economy needs this, right?