Training > Certification

Our new Professional Certification Path for Lean-Agile Teams

Our new Lean-Agile Project Manager curriculum, as part of our Lean-Agile training initiative, is unique in the industry and has brought thousands of professionals into successful transitions and adoptions of Agile practices. Our certification program began with providing Scrum Certification:

Podcast: Professional Scrum Certification by Net Objectives


Net Objectives is not affiliated with the Scrum Alliance.

There is a lot of buzz about certification these days. In our mind, almost all of it is hype and marketing. So why do we have a certification program ourselves? We have one to provide an honest alternative to the entry level that most people are looking for.

First of all, what does certification mean? Well, there are really two kinds of certification programs. One is a certification of an individual and the other is certification that you have successfully completed a set curriculum. In both cases, however, what competencies the certification represents should be stated for the certification to have any meaning.

Almost all Scrum certifications awarded up till now have been given by the Scrum Alliance. While they offer a certification of having taken a course, they make it sound as if the person himself/herself is being certified. True, a test is given, but the certification is provided regardless of the results of the exam. Even this test, however, is about the basic rules of Scrum – providing little insights into what someone needs to know to apply Scrum to the real world. It’s like saying a person is a certified football player because they know the rules of game even if they don’t know what to do in response to a given situation.

In our mind, a certification that you’ve taken a course has very little meaning. It has even less meaning if there is no list of competencies that the person being certified should have. We clearly state and promote our certification as being certified in attending a course. We also state the competencies someone should have to do Scrum – providing our Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams to each attendee.

We’ve summarized some of the differences between our and the Scrum Alliance certification programs in the following table:

 Net Objectives Scrum Alliance
Course evaluations given to ensure quality level of instructor?YesNo
Statement of competencies needed to be an effective Scrum Master given to students? YesNo
Consistent curriculum covered by different instructors? YesNo

Required to pass exam?

YesNo

Our Certification Program Is Better In Other Ways

Knowing rules of the game are not enough. Knowing the principles on which the game is based is critical. We teach the principles underneath the practices we cover in our courses. Our Scrum Master Certification program is not just about the rules of Scrum, but rather about the principles on which Scrum rests. Scrum's roots come from Lean-Thinking. In an interview with Agile Collab, Ken Schwaber (co-creator of Scrum and former head of the Scrum Alliance) said -

"I estimate that 75% of those organizations using Scrum will not succeed in getting the benefits that they hope for from it. ... Scrum is a very simple framework within which the "game" of complex product development is played. Scrum exposes every inadequacy or dysfunction within an organization's product and system development practices. The intention of Scrum is to make them transparent so the organization can fix them. Unfortunately, many organizations change Scrum to accommodate the inadequacies or dysfunctions instead of solving them."

In analyzing where and why Scrum teams have failed to get the results desired, we have come to an inescapable conclusion - Scrum works readily in some contexts and not in others. This should not be a surprise. But the second conclusion is more profound - in many contexts in which Scrum does not work readily, Scrum has no power to improve the context in which it is in. In other words, the impediments that one must fix are often outside of the scope of what Scrum helps you do. These impediments are often not even seen or if they are, are often viewed as "just the way it is." In fact, I'd go so far as to say certain Scrum attitudes often makes things worse.

We address both of these issues by providing Lean-Thinking in our Scrum training as well as by providing the Lean-Agile Project Manager Certification course which teaches Scrum, Kanban and Scrumban – thereby ensuring you will understand the process you should be using.

People attending any of our Scrum, Lean-Agile Project Management, Product Owner, or Advanced Lean-Agile Project Management for Scrum Masters, receive the following benefits:

  1. Subscriber access to our web-site for one year (a $195 value). This gives access to days worth of Lean, Agile, and Technical training
  2. A copy of the Net Objectives Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams

Our Related Courses

  • This three-day certification course teaches project managers how to use Lean principles and Agile practices to deliver profitable projects within the enterprise. Using new ways to think about the enterprise, the course establishes a model of the lean enterprise organization, and teaches project managers how to manage the alignment between business and technology teams so that a stream of highly profitable solutions and applications flow from the development organization.
  • This course blends several technologies together in a breakthrough two-day course that gives the tools the entire development team needs to uncover and manage the story discover/definition process. This course moves well beyond the typical Scrum Product Owner course by applying principles of Lean Thinking. Software development is most like product development. That is, much of it is about discovering what the customer needs and how to build it. This course focuses on how to most efficiently discover those features that will return the highest benefit to the clients of a company. This is a very hands on course where participants go through the process of creating a product backlog. Students learn to drive story writing from business value. This course is designed within the context of Lean Software Development. This solves many problems in other Agile Analysis methods because it enables Agile practitioners to keep the big picture in mind (which focusing on business value requires) while working on the small pieces (which Agility requires).