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March 25, 2007 
Factual Errors - And an Interesting Scrum Criticism
An interesting article called Credibility Crisis is worth while reading. I would like to point out two factual errors. Despite the errors, the author's concerns are well-taken. Here are the errors:
1) The average price per CSM is much less than US$1500. Your "conservative estimate" is not conservative at all. For quite some time, the average was less than $1000 in fact. As a scrum trainer, I know that the people that I have certified have averaged about US$750. I suspect this is true for most of the trainers, and it accounts for volume discounts when doing training in a corporate setting, doing pro-bono training, doing training in countries with lower costs and training that is done by CSTs that are employees of large companies such as Microsoft and British Telecom where the "industry" sees no revenue.
2) "Well planned marketing" Ha!!! That's a good one! There has been exactly one advertisement issued by the ScrumAlliance (in Dr. Dobbs Journal), and all other advertising and promotion is done hodge-podge by the individual CSTs or the companies they work for. The only coordination point is the web site where all the CSTs are required to list their public courses. Ken Schwaber and Mike Cohn, as the most well-read authors in the Scrum community get a large bulk of the _interest_ in the training (I'm not sure what their actual numbers are for # of CSMs).
Those two errors undermine the author's argument in the article, but don't completely invalidate it.
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Posted by Mishkin Berteig at March 25, 2007 05:52 PM
