Using Scrum? Get Certified

It is always amusing for a speaker of UK English to hear an American professional declare that they are certified. To be certified in the UK means that a Doctor or a social worker has committed you to a centre for the treatment for mental illness. The Oxford English Dictionary term for professional qualifications is ‘certificated’. Scrum certification is a hot topic, and will increasingly become so, as Agile development becomes more and more mainstream. So, if you are a practitioner of Scrum, should you be certificated, or should you be certified for even asking the question?

The Scrum Alliance

I’ve been practising Scrum formally since 1998. I say formally because I’d been working for a while previously on organizational patterns with Jim Coplien. Organizational patterns form one of the roots of Scrum and, arguably, an article Jim wrote in Dr. Dobbs Journal twenty years ago was the first one on Scrum’s principles. It was Martine Devos who introduced me to Scrum as we know it today at the 1998 OOPSLA convention. There were no Scrum professional qualifications in those days. Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) appeared for the first time with the founding of the Scrum Alliance in 2007. CSM was introduced in order to give organizations seeking Capability Maturity Model (CMM) level 3 accreditation the evidence they needed to show that they trained people in their chosen process.

When Scrum certifications came out I wasn’t interested, frankly. I was working for an organization (a British University) that wasn’t interested in CMM. I had been practising Scrum for nearly a decade and neither I nor my employers were particularly excited by the thought of paying a thousand dollars or so for me to go on a Scrum Alliance validated training course in order to learn about what I already knew.

CSM, CSPO and CSP Certifications

That was then. This is now. I became a Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) in May 2011 after attending a training course delivered by my good friend, Martine Devos. It kind of closed the circle to have the woman who introduced me to Scrum train me for CSPO. CSM and CSPO are the two ‘entry level’ Scrum certifications offered by Scrum Alliance and attending a training course delivered by a Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) is still the only way to get either of them. Less than 5 months later I became a Certified Scrum Professional (CSP), a qualification that acknowledges my experience in using Scrum in practice. I have maintained those qualifications ever since, as well as adding others (Project Management Institute Certified Agile Practitioner (PMI-ACP), Professional ScrumMaster and SAFe Program Consultant)

So, what happened? Did I go mad sometime between 2007 and 2011?

Read more at http://blog.learningtree.com/uk/using-scrum-get-certified/