Australian Scrum Community

An article about Scrum was published in Australian Computerworld magazine late last week. Ordinarily this would be nothing but a positive from my perspective. It is great to see Australia’s burgeoning Scrum community getting some much needed press. Disappointingly though, for me at least, this positive has been marred by the erroneous claim – in the very first line – about Australia’s first Certified Scrum Practitioner. Aside from the individual identified being an Australian software developer, this statement is entirely incorrect.

The dates relating to this that have been provided to me by senior members of the Scrum Alliance are quite interesting. I submitted my successful application for certification as a Scrum Practitioner on October 25, 2006. I have been informed by a senior Scrum Trainer that it was two days later on October 27 that Martin Kearns completed his initial CSM course. Two days after that I received notification that I had been awarded the Certified Scrum Practitioner accreditation. Martin did not tell me, when I specifically asked, what the date of his CSP accreditation was but I suspect that it is closer to February of this year. He did however offer an apology to me (without me asserting that anything was incorrect) for which I am grateful.

In this last week I have seen just how fast articles like this get propagated around the globe. Before I knew it, the erroneous article had been syndicated to mainstream IT publications in Germany, the Netherlands, India and, as if that wasn’t enough, it arrived in my own inbox, neatly snipped at the end of the offending first line!

All this this wouldn’t have worried me so much if it weren’t for the reality that what is printed in mainstream publications tends to be accepted as fact – until proven otherwise at similar volume. Also, it concerns me that such information can have real commercial and professional ramifications for my employer as well as for myself.

I’m sorry if this seems harsh but I guess that the thing that most disappoints me about this is that no one involved with the article bothered to even type ‘first australian certified scrummaster practitioner’ or similar into Google . If they had they would have discovered a number of pre-existing statements about the first CSP in Australia. Another tip might be that the numbers that appear on the URLs of profiles at the ScrumAlliance site have no correlation to the chronology of different people gaining a second certification. A good way to be sure is to check with someone who is authoritative on the matter. I had my assertion verified in October by Ken Schwaber himself.

Something that I have learned from this experience is that it is a good idea to update your profile on the Scrum Alliance site with what others in the community should know about you. The site was completely overhauled some months back and information such as certification dates and email addresses was not migrated across to the new site.

Anyway, despite having a pretty bad week as a result of this, I have been working hard to turn this into a positive for the Scrum community. I have drafted some material for Computerworld that I hope will be published and bring more exposure to Scrum and the potential that I believe it has to deliver more value for less – to increase productivity at a time that IT managers around the country are scratching their heads about what to do about the IT skills shortage.

Finally, I have noticed that Martin is based in Melbourne. Perhaps this is a prompt to invite more ScrumMasters from down that way to get involved here.