Saturday, May 02, 2015

We are Creating Agile Orphans

This is a draft, but I wanted to share it with others before the Scrum Gathering. 

It is my premise that the invisible hand of self-interest is undermining our work in the marketplace.

While that statement may be true in a Capitalistic economy in general (Enron, Pharmaceutical sales, Big Tobacco, oil spills), it should not be acceptable in the agile community.

We are values driven.

The full value stream for agile adoptions is not just CSM training. It is the successful transformation of the companies in our world.

Those who only train and/or staff, leave agile orphans - those who don’t know enough, have no support, no community and no covering.

We are obligated to act on the full value stream if we want to change the world of work.

As a profession, our entry level number of Certified ScrumMasters moving to the next level of growth and maturity (the CSP) drops over 99%.... 99%!

Those making it to becoming a coach (CSC) - 0.02%

Yet we incentivize this. Trainers, for the most part, make money per student. So, more students = more money. We don't limit the number of classes. We don't even limit the class size, though most agree that 20 is the limit, and the most credible study of class size found the ideal to be 13 - 17. Even if not, we are smart enough to know that self-interest doesn’t give good, long-term results. And shouldn’t we, as management consultants, know and expect that?