Jochen Krebs wrote a post “Did Scrum jump the shark?” [1] that I first found a bit confusing but then I read it again and discovered very interesting thoughts:

“Wouldn’t you think that a group of 100,000 scrum master professionals would make a difference in the overall project success rate? A fact the Scrum Community will need to face sometime soon.” [1]

Yes, I completely agree, and I also see that we as Scrum Trainers and as Scrum Alliance fail to answer this question. The Scrum community is not prepared to understand what it means to be that successful. But our success is evident. Round about 60000 people trained as CSMs plus around 2 to 4 times as many in team trainings and company trainings means to be successful. We fail, as community to support this massive amount of people with services that help them to be professional. And Jochen is right also, when he writes further:

“It will be the application of practices, techniques and experiences which will make the long-lasting difference in a broader project management community. I believe we are miles away from this state by teaching  too many fundatmentals without a focus on hands-on practices.” [1]

I do not know if we teach too many fundamentals in the CSM class, (maybe … at least I observe that this is a necessary part), but in fact, we need to find much better ways to help people perform their roles as ScrumMasters. We need additional classes, better books, and more good conferences that help people to connect and to address their issues instead of having consulting shows (consultants shows how cool they are) like the last Gatherings and most conferences (see the program of the XP Days). [2]Where are the users, at these conferences? Where are the people who do it, in the field? The real practitioners?

And I agree with Jochen in this statement: “As negative as the current development might appear, there is in my opinion huge potential ahead of us. [...] if Scrum can consistently proof that it reduces time to market, increases quality, morale, transparency and productivity, decision makers will listen and buy in; no question.” [1]

This was and is the success story of Scrum. Decision makers in the companies do not need phrases, like we had 5 years ago, when I started Scrum. We told them: “Trust me, it is logical, it will work.” Today we can say: “I did it with Scrum, we helped X customers, Y teams, it works, it always works when we do it properly”. This is the complete difference.

Scrum has grown up! It has a body of practice (not to say knowledge) that we can apply to guarantee successful implementations. The only thing now is: Apply it! Again and again. Changing one organization at a time.

[1] http://jochenkrebs.com/agileportfolio/?p=86

[2] http://borisgloger.com/2009/11/22/the-xp-days-tour-starts-tomorrow/