Writing a page on “How to Adopt Scrum” reminded me that the CSM course started around ’02 because Ken wanted to help those of us who already knew Scrum to be better coaches. It was a great experience and helped my coaching ability. But it didn’t teach me scrum. I already knew Scrum & reading Ken’s book was a prerequisite for the course.
The CSM class has changed a lot over the years and now teaches how to be an SM. But it’s also often used to teach the dev team how to do Scrum as well. I’ve long thought this ineffective and was much of the reason Net Objectives left the Scrum Alliance.
Since then, of course, both Scrum Inc. and the Scrum Alliance have come up with team training, but the CSM class is still the most common one.
I am reminded of Bucky Fuller’s:
“I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem. “