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For anyone involved with Scrum and who got their ScrumMaster certification from Scrum Alliance may have noticed that the founders of Scrum, namely Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, no longer sit on the board of that organization. Ken Schwaber has in fact gone off and created another organization and site at Scrum.org. On that site, he goes on to elaborate on why he branched off:
An organization can either be mission driven or money driven. Not both. When I started the Scrum Alliance, our mission was to improve the profession of software development. That later became “to transform the world of work.” By 2007, I believe that the quest for money had made the mission secondary at Scrum Alliance. I failed to see the effects that my initiatives would have on the money-making of the Scrum Alliance and its members. If I had mapped the money-making activities of the Scrum Alliance to these initiatives, it would have been obvious to me that the community would resist them...
My goal of strengthening Scrum and improving the profession was in clear conflict with the community’s goals of maximizing revenues and incomes. This came to a head in August 2009 when the Scrum Alliance board of directors unanimously asked for my resignation. The board members saw my mission as detrimental to their mission of supporting the CST franchise.
Tom Mellor, the new chairman of the board, sent out an email announcing my resignation. After that, the board terminated the programs described above. They cancelled, re-announced, and finally rolled out a basic assessment that failed to provide any meaningful measure of understanding. They terminated the ScrumAlliance’s commitments to our partners, Microsoft and Accentient, in developing courses for Scrum developers. They have since introduced a weak Certified Scrum Developer program that is designed to protect the income of the existing CSTs.
It seems what basically happened was that the founders felt the profit motive outshined the community and the spirit of Scrum and that Ken's desire to place emphasis on the development certitification for Scrum was threatening to the existing Certified ScrumMaster and Certifified Scrum Training program and profits.
So there is now a new Scrum.org organization with new Scrum certifications that have a heavy emphasis on the software development aspect of Scrum:
So what does this all mean? What are the implications for those already certified by Scrum Alliance or seeking Scrum certification?
At this point its too early to say, but I don't think the above negates your CSM if you already have one and I plan to continue on updating it so long as it is useful in gaining me industry recognition that I have some Scrum knowledge from formal training as well as real life experience. I do plan to look into the Professional Scrum Developer (PSD) program as I come from a strong software development background with Java and .Net and would like to see how a rigourous 5 day training program for team members would look like. Though I am now mostly on the project management side of Scrum, it would help to see it again from the team perspective.
As far as concerns of this method still being viable with such disruptions, ironically, I actually think it is a good sign since these kinds of disputes occur when a movement becomes very successful which Scrum has. It will mature and consolidate and by that time maybe another movement will take its place. It really doesn't matter to me, as the spirit of Scrum is eternal for those who need a lightweight project management framework to deliver incremental deliverables in an iterative fashion for those who's project are implemented in a highly dynamic and even chaotic first to market like environments.
My goal of strengthening Scrum and improving the profession was in clear conflict with the community’s goals of maximizing revenues and incomes. This came to a head in August 2009 when the Scrum Alliance board of directors unanimously asked for my resignation. The board members saw my mission as detrimental to their mission of supporting the CST franchise.
Tom Mellor, the new chairman of the board, sent out an email announcing my resignation. After that, the board terminated the programs described above. They cancelled, re-announced, and finally rolled out a basic assessment that failed to provide any meaningful measure of understanding. They terminated the ScrumAlliance’s commitments to our partners, Microsoft and Accentient, in developing courses for Scrum developers. They have since introduced a weak Certified Scrum Developer program that is designed to protect the income of the existing CSTs.
Posted on: December 16, 2011 08:49 PM |
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