Tobias Mayer on the step back of Ken Schwaber and the history of the SA

Tobias Mayer has written a super nice article about Ken Schwaber that I do not fully agree with [1].

Some notes about the history of the Scrum Alliance ….

The history of the Scrum Alliance started in 2002 with a website called www.ScrumAlliance.org. It was run by a very nice person who wanted to create a source for scrum. He stepped back and the Scrum Alliance was dead. I was involved in this, talked to Ken and he said, he will put not the names of all freshly certified ScrumMaster on a html page under the domain www.scrumalliance.org. This was the idea to help the community to see it is not a Ken Schwaber certificate, what it was in fact.

Autumn 2004 in Boston, Ken renounced the SA as a FOR profit organisation, Ken, Mike and Esther had been the founders. Why FOR profit. Just because of the hassle to create a NON Profit organisation.

And now happened what must have happened, as Ken and the others only wanted to make sure that we do have an organisation that can make sure it is not a Ken Schwaber show, all people believed now that the SA will run the business, will make the rules, will create the business model for all Scrum enthusiast. I was also not very amused … but for very personal reasons. I do not love to start something and suddenly I was not part of the game anymore. … I needed two years to understand that this was completely stupid.

Ken, Esther and Mike … this is now an assumption, guessing … had been far to bussy to run the thing they created well. Sometimes they wanted to do things fast and did a move, and the trainers got pissed by not getting asked, sometimes Ken was pissed because we did not understand him.

Then we had the Ken Rubin area of the SA. He was the first designated CEO of the FOR Profit organisations. From my european point of view … this changed nothing. Besides the fact that he managed that we, the CSTs, had suddenly a contract with the Scrum Alliance that was not what we wanted in this way, but what we CSTs demanded in a Trainer Retreat 8 months before. This Contract was the big ISSUE that caused at the end that also Tobias and someone else was pushed out from the SA for 10 months. Yes … this is the dark age of the SA. We had no idea what happened. And we needed to say yes to the contract, if we wanted to certify.

Basically this contract is not an evil thing. It only says I am not allowed to do any other Certification called Scrum besides the SA certification.

Transparency in all this activities? No! Here Tobias is absolutely right. A chance to do it differently … I doubt. Why, because there was no interest of nobody to change this. In the USA the business mindset took over. People who had been part of the game made too much money with Scrum. In Europe … we had been to far away, to have influence

Then Ken and Mike discovered some issues in the way the SA was run by Kenny and they hired a very very experienced guy in building non-profit organisations to rebuild the SA as a NON-profit organisation: Jim Cundiff. That started the last two years an area I call the new transparency area. No one was ever more open about the SA than he. And he changed the face of the SA from a Source for Scrum to an organisation that wants to transform the world of work [3].

He created new User groups, did super successful Gatherings and tried to build a community amongst us trainers. One result was that 7 of us, including me, tried to build something like a trainer board, without any power, because the trainers refused in Orlando to give this group of people any binding authority. That was ok, and we started to work. (I was too busy to do really something. sorry)

The area of Jim finished two weeks ago with the announcement that Jim and Ken stepped back from their duties in the SA. A week before Jim announced that he is not going to launch the test for the certification.

I only learned last week that we had in the SA a long discussion about Ken’s new idea of a Certified Scrum Developer Programm, between Ken and Jim and obviously others people in the board. Ken mentioned this program in a conference in Munich to me and the whole audience, but no more information went out. Also some of the CSTs in Germany asked Jim, there was silence. In the meantime Ken created some ideas about the CSD with Microsoft. A first trial training was given last week according to my information. More I do not know.

Two weeks ago, Lowell Lindstrom was suddenly  announced as the new interims CEO, by Tom Mellor, Chief of the Board of Directors. (This happened without that we knew someone was searched) and earlier this week, Mike Cohn was announced as returning back to the Board of the Scrum Alliance. Again, no clear communication about that the Board of Directors wanted a new member.

Lowell tried to make very clear, he wants to proceed with the work of Jim. I really hope he will be successful. He has a lot of odds against him.

F.e. what I learned and know since the last Scrum Gathering, including the Scrum Trainer Retreat in Orlando, Spring 2009, most CSTs do not have a big interest in the Scrum Alliance. Some mentioned to me, completely honest: “What business interest do I have in the SA?” Jim mentioned with a lot of frustration … “Yes, the SA does have a personal relationship with every Scrum Trainer, not with the community.”  The community of CSTs is fractioned, and most successful CSTs are not really participating in the SA. Most of them are frustrated because, we are not able to agree in nothing. But … as a justification … most of not really knew how, or have been busy building a business around Scrum (me, for example).

[2] (Again, my personal interpretation.)

[3] Vision statement of the Scrum Alliance. www.scrumalliance.org.