How should you qualify your agile practitioners?
Alongside focusing on delivering value, responding well to change, and collaborating well with stakeholders, agile practices are dependent on high-performing teams of motivated practitioners who embody technical excellence and great design.
When you’re recruiting for your team, how should you qualify people as agile practitioners?
We asked Steve Forte, board member of the Scrum Alliance, and his answers might surprise some; even as part of the leadership team for the largest agile certification organisation in the world, with over 300,000 Certified ScrumMasters, certification was not top of his list.
Certification, Steve says, is nice to have, it shows that candidates are willing to invest in themselves; however sometimes certification schemes can drive an exclusivity and closed mind-set, which is at odds with the values and principles embodied in the Agile Manifesto.
Any framework, and therefore certification scheme, should conform to the manifesto, so he qualifies someone as an agile practitioner by ensuring they adhere to these underlying values and principles. After that, he looks for expertise in specific areas, such as extreme programming (XP), Scrum, etc.
Provided that people build the skills and behaviours on a firm foundation of values and principles, then when it comes time to shift to new agile working practices, such as Kanban, people can more readily make that shift.
At Optimation, we believe strongly that you recruit first for someone’s aptitude and overall experience; you can always train people in skills and put them through certification schemes.
Of course, we do align with key recognised schemes, as customers often require this, so we look to certify our developers in Java or .NET, our BAs as CBAP, our PMs as PMP, plus of course Certified ScrumMaster etc.
When looking to provide our practitioners with a firm foundation in agile practices, one that can grow with them in their discipline, the only framework we found that fitted that bill was the International Consortium for Agile, as this expands from a foundation level into all the disciplines.
We have now geared up to deliver an Agile Fundamentals course that qualifies people as Certified Agile Practitioners. This three-day course gives attendees a firm basis in all the values and principles, as well as hands on experience of applying them through a whole project lifecycle – from concept to delivery. We’re running this through October for all our practitioners and some customers too. If you are interested in finding out more, please get in contact at david.morris@optimation.co.nz.
