I’m starting the year with a rant against certain agile training courses. I won’t name them because I’m allowing myself this rant without having participated in one of them, without knowing the trainers, or the company that sponsors them (so take this rant with whatever grain of salt you like). I’m allowing myself this rant because of the regular feedback I get from trainees who have participated in them since the end of 2010. A rant against training courses where people come out with more confusion and questions than with real reflection or real learning, and especially the feeling of having been taken for a ride (when you also know that these are certification training courses, expensive ones, and you know the value of the certification…. automatically delivered at the end of the session…). A rant against trainers who are out of touch and who answer without any common sense, without any concrete examples, who sit enthroned in their clouds.

Here are some of the feedback I’ve received:

“Why Scrum?”

“Because it will increase your productivity by 400%!”

“ah… and why?”

“Because it’s Scrum!”

ok, that gets us far…

“I work with a QA (quality assurance) team of 10 people in Romania, how should I integrate them with my Scrum framework in Paris?”

“Bring them to France”

That’s probably a good answer in the absolute, but it’s inappropriate to limit it to that. I know that a shock is needed, and that becoming “agile” is a strong cultural change. I understand and I often practice the “answer with a question” approach in training, but it must be a journey, a reflection that must be anchored in current practices: with necessary concrete examples, highlighting constraints, risks, objectives, etc.

An acquaintance retorts: “yes but 2 or 3 days to begin a personal psychological revolution is short”. Yes, naturally, but this training is often an essential first step. If you have the impression when leaving that the trainer ate too many mushrooms, that’s already a very bad start, and it won’t help us in our daily work!

With that, best wishes for 2011