The Agile Problem
Accreditation Industry's Quality Challenge
The agile accreditation industry, encompassing organizations like Scrum Alliance, Scaled Agile, Inc., Scrum.org, and, surprisingly, the Project Management Institute, has evolved into a profit-driven set of entities that often prioritizes monetization over quality outcomes, undermining its credibility. This analysis explores the industry's failure to manage quality, focusing on the monetization of training versus the quality of outcomes, and proposes a key quality control step to enhance credibility.
The fake rooftop that hid an entire aircraft factory!
The Monetization Trap: Profit Over Quality
The business model of major agile certification providers relies heavily on selling training courses, exams, and renewals, generating significant revenue. For instance, costs for certifications vary widely, with PSM I at $500, CSM at $450-$1,150, and ICAgile certifications starting at $700 . This model incentivizes high certification volumes, as providers profit from lowering barriers to entry, such as offering short courses (e.g., two-day CSM training) and easy multiple-choice exams that test rote memorization rather than practical application.
A 2023 PMI Agile Survey revealed that 60% of hiring managers doubt the value of agile certifications due to inconsistent practitioner performance , underscoring the gap between certification and real-world competence. Entry-level certifications, in particular, are criticized for not indicating real-world experience or even basic understanding of Agile values, with some low-quality Scrum certifications merely requiring attendance and passing a few exam questions .
Most agile certifications (Scrum Master, Product Owner, SAFe, etc.) focus heavily on knowledge of frameworks, ceremonies, and prescribed processes. You can memorize the Scrum Guide, understand sprint mechanics, and pass an exam without ever having navigated a real retrospective where team members are genuinely frustrated, or facilitated a planning session when requirements are genuinely unclear.
The real skills that matter in agile work are often the hardest to certify:
Forming cross functional teams versus a reliance on specialization
Facilitating conversations about prioritization based on data vs. intuition
Adapting frameworks to fit actual organizational constraints
Building self-organizing teams that make their own decisions
Breaking the "rules" to introduce change
These emerge from practice, failure, reflection, and iteration - basically, being agile about learning agile.
The agile accreditation industry's focus on monetization has overshadowed its commitment to quality, leaving a gap between certification and real-world performance. By mandating practical experience and shifting the focus from exams to demonstrated competence, the industry can restore trust and deliver on agile’s original promise: empowering teams to build better software through skilled, adaptive practices. This approach, while debated, offers a path to align certifications with the needs of employers and teams, ensuring value delivery in an increasingly competitive market.
The Status Quo
Ultimately, the status quo will remain in place until progressive management practices are pushed aside by leaders in middle management, and their bosses in the upper echelons, as they realize that an over reliance on methods and processes, are not a substitute for domain knowledge and actual expertise. A Deming like figure focused on Quality might arise in the quarter to quarter obsessed finance led management culture. Yet, until that, or some norm changing event occurs, the best efforts of bottom up change agents, regime change if you will, will continue to swim upstream against the tide of bureaucratic anti-change management focused on status and short term results.
Articles:
6 Popular Agile Certifications in 2025 | Coursera
Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion - Simple Thread
Have We Taken Agile Too Far? - Harvard Business Review
The uncomfortable truth about Agile | BCS
Entry-level Agile certifications don’t mean as much as you think - Responsive Advisors