One of the joys (not) of being a professional Trainer and Technical Writer is that I am assumed to be a Subject Matter Expert in all of the the things that I teach. With many of the products, services, or processes I train others on, I have a working familiarity, but lack the deep knowledge required to be a SME. Ask the SME why the product, service, or process functions the way it does; ask the trainer how it works, and more importantly, how to get to the next step.

Lately I’ve been training people on using JIRA. (I know we can spell it Jira, but at this point in my long association with the product, the muscle memory for all caps is ingrained.) For those less familiar, “JIRA Software is a project management tool that supports any agile methodology” as per the JIRA website. It was created in 2002 for software development, but has been in continuous use since, across various development efforts (software, infrastructure, more).

Training people on JIRA requires reinforcing the agile framework, because the software relies on that framework. In the JIRA training course, I explain how to get to the next step in using the software, and I also provide the context for why that step is the next step. That context is the agile development process. Therefore, for JIRA training, I definitely have a bit of SME peanut butter mixed in with my chocolaty Trainer goodness.

To Cert Or Not To Cert?

Acting as my own SME on JIRA (with a lot of help from Google and the Atlassian JIRA Community), I started thinking again about getting scrum certification. For the most part, professional cert programs have struck me as a money making racket for the course providers, and they don’t actually guarantee any level of ability of the cert holders. Certs do, however, give employers a baseline level of knowledge that they can expect cert holders possess.

To help myself reach a decision on whether or not to get a scrum cert, I started looking into what that process is, and the costs involved. As I figured, it varies wildly.

More on this coming soon.

An article I read on AgileLiterarcy.comasks a valuable question, Is your Product Owner a SME?  The article illuminated for me why I succeeded in certain Product Owner roles and, shall we say, did less well in others.