Picture credit: Dan Abramson
We’d like to present our first nominee for the Newt Gingrich ‘Lunar Colony 2020’ bullshit agile hubris award (the Luna BAHA).
Ed Cortis, the lucky recipient of the email below, is CIO at Lonely Planet, and has a pretty decent knowledge of how challenging it is to upgrade from the organisational equivalent of Microsoft Windows 3.11 (using commands to control!) to a more Mac OSX agile-like culture – for 4 years he built and ran Lonely Planet’s agile – ITIL – DevOps operational teams, before taking over technology overall in 2011. It is an organisational transition that not many people pull off – but once an Apple agile convert, you’ll never go back.
Ed consequently knows a fair bit about Scrum, plus XP and even Kanban, and the resulting hybrids that the couple of dozen teams at LP now use every day to get things done.
It wasn’t the email’s bizarre spelling and grammar, or the screwy mail-merge that started it off with ‘Dear Cortis’ that sent the numb feeling to Ed’s legs – it was the suspicion that within Australian business’s desperately scrambling to ‘see their business grow at an amazing pace like never before’, too many IT departments would fall for an email like this and leap on the vendor’s international Scrum certification bandwagon, believing the hyperbole. I mean, they’ve got Mike Beedle, world-renowned Scrum guy!
I can hear it now – “Off you go to training, and then come back to make us live by the values and practices of agile please!” As we say in NZ – “yeah right”. It would be a funny joke, if it weren’t horribly true.
Are we being too literal, harsh and grumpy? You decide:
Oddly the main benefits quoted are about you getting a certificate, not a team successfully transforming to a top agile modus operandi. Resume driven development then.
So sorry to disappoint anyone, but:
a) The simple task of ‘just getting rid of conventional ways of working’ will take most of the organisation 
to change their ways, and that won’t come with this certificate;
b) Implementing Scrum in your project will never be a cakewalk, no matter how many credits you collect, or exams you pass; and
c) Once you’ve finally grasped that, and you’re certain Scrum is the one for you, why not just club together the cash you and your mates might have dropped on a certificate each, and get someone like Kane Mar at Scrumology, Martin Kearns at SMS-Renewtek, or Sandy Mamoli in NZ (or plenty of other good local people) to show you hands-on how Scrum actually works on an actual business or product problem you have.
Hell, they even do certification training, but I don’t think you’ll find them ever promising a cakewalk.
A moon walk maybe…
The agile industry needs to be held to task for these blatantly deceptive emails…. there is no evidence it works at all yet they make the most extravagant of claims
Jordan
For some reason, the thing that most jumped out at me, was the US pricing for the Australian location for the training.