Agile Certification Economy: Follow the Money

I wasn't planning to write this post, I was planning to keep picking apart ceremonies and frameworks, one dysfunction at a time.

Then the CEO of PMI deleted my comment.

One question. On his own LinkedIn post. About a number he published himself, an 85%-to-32% satisfaction gap. I asked what his new manifesto offers that the previous ones didn't. He edited his reply. Accused a four-follower account of self-promotion. And removed the exchange.

Same week, Jeff Sutherland, the man who invented Scrum, told me on LinkedIn that 65% of Scrum teams are late, over budget, with unhappy customers. His diagnosis? They haven't implemented the protocol correctly. Not "maybe we got something wrong." Not "let's look at what's broken." Just: two out of three teams failed, and it's their fault.

A CEO who deletes questions. An inventor who blames users and a market that keeps growing.

I stopped looking at the methodology, started looking at the money and the money explains everything.

I Pulled The Numbers Nobody Puts In The Same Room

You can find certification data if you dig. Scrum.org publishes their count. Scrum Alliance mentions members on their homepage. SAFe brags about trained professionals. PMI files public tax returns as a nonprofit. But nobody puts the full picture together. Because the full picture is obscene.

Scrum.org: 1.17 million certifications. PSM I exam is $200. But most people pay $1,000-$1,500 for a course on top. Ken Schwaber's organization. The quieter of the two Scrum bodies. Still over a million badges shipped.

Scrum Alliance: 1.5 million certified members. This is the one where you can't just take an exam, you have to buy the course. Two days. $250 at the low end. $2,495 at the high end. For a workshop based on a 14-page document. And the cert expires every two years, so you get to pay again.

Scaled Agile (SAFe): Over 2 million professionals trained. This is the enterprise beast. Courses run $500-$1,500. But here's the part that should stop you: your SAFe certification expires every year. Renewal is $295. Per cert. A SAFe Program Consultant with three active certifications pays $885 annually just to keep badges lit on LinkedIn. Not to learn anything. Not to pass a test. Just to not lose the badge. It's a protection racket in business casual.

PMI: Over a million PMP holders. 750,000 members. PMP exam costs $555 if you're not a member. PMI pulls in over $200 million a year from certifications and membership dues. They're a nonprofit. Two hundred million dollars. Nonprofit.

Five million certifications. Four organizations. And that's before you count ICAgile, SAFe partner trainers, the thousands of independent "Agile coaches" selling their own workshops, and the corporate training departments running internal bootcamps.

Industry analysts estimate the enterprise agile transformation market, the full ecosystem of training, coaching, consulting, and tooling, at $49 billion. Growing at 18.5% per year. On track to double by 2029.

Forty-nine billion dollars built on a methodology that its own inventor admits fails 65% of the time.

Read that again. I had to.

The Cert Is Not a Diploma. It's a Subscription.

This is the part that radicalized me.

When you get a computer science degree, it doesn't expire in 12 months. When you pass the bar, you don't need to attend bar-branded webinars to keep your license. When a surgeon gets board certified, the renewal isn't "watch 40 hours of content we produced."

But in Agile world:

SAFe certs die every year. $295 to resuscitate. You don't retake the exam. You don't demonstrate new competence. You pay. The badge stays. You don't pay. The badge greys out. That's it. That's the whole mechanism.

Scrum Alliance certs die every two years. To renew, you earn "Scrum Education Units." How? By consuming Scrum Alliance content. Attending Scrum Alliance gatherings. Taking Scrum Alliance courses. Reading Scrum Alliance-approved material. The snake eats its own tail so elegantly you almost admire it.

PMI certs die every three years. You need "Professional Development Units." Earned through PMI courses. PMI events. PMI publications. PMI-approved content.

See the pattern?

Create the credential. Build the expiration. Require your own ecosystem for renewal. Extract forever.

Every cert body has built a closed-loop system where the cost of maintaining competence is permanently routed through their tollbooth.

This isn't education. This is SaaS with a lanyard.

The Framework Gets More Complex Because Complexity Is Revenue

If Agile is about eliminating waste, why does the certification stack keep expanding?

In 2011, SAFe was one framework. Today it offers over 20 certification tracks. SAFe Agilist. SAFe Scrum Master. SAFe Advanced Scrum Master. SAFe Product Owner/Product Manager. SAFe Release Train Engineer. SAFe Lean Portfolio Manager. SAFe Architect. SAFe Government Practitioner. SAFe for Teams. Leading SAFe. Implementing SAFe. And on and on.

Nobody at Toyota said "we need 20 types of certified lean practitioners." But Toyota wasn't selling certifications. SAFe is.

Scrum Alliance's latest move: "AI for Scrum Masters" microcredentials. A partnership with Northwestern University and Coursera. Not because your standups need GPT. Because the cert market needs fresh SKUs on the shelf every quarter. The product roadmap for certifications follows the same logic as a SaaS company's feature roadmap: ship something new so existing customers have a reason to spend again.

And PMI? In 2019 they bought Disciplined Agile, an entire methodology, specifically for its certification potential. What happened after the acquisition? DA's market adoption dropped from 7% to 4%. The people who had already invested in DA certifications watched their investment get absorbed into PMI's portfolio and quietly diluted. PMI got what it wanted. More products in the catalog. More exam fees. More renewal cycles.

Now they're launching a "Manifesto for Enterprise Agility." Not because enterprises asked for another manifesto. Because another manifesto creates another product line creates another cert track creates another renewal stream.

In this industry, the answer to a 65% failure rate is never "simplify." It's "sell more."

Fourteen Pages and a Prayer

Let me tell you about the CSM. The Certified ScrumMaster. The gateway drug of the Agile certification economy.

It's the most popular entry-level cert in the industry. Over a million people hold one. Here's the whole process:

Attend a two-day course. Sixteen hours total. Take a 50-question exam. Need 74% to pass. The exam is open book. The book is The Scrum Guide. The Scrum Guide is 14 pages.

Fourteen pages. The terms of service for your Netflix account are longer than the source material for this certification. I've onboarded junior developers with documentation packages thicker than The Scrum Guide. I've written incident reports longer than The Scrum Guide. The README for some open-source libraries is more comprehensive than the canonical text of a billion-dollar certification industry.

And the price for this? Anywhere from $250 to $2,495 depending on which trainer you pick. For two days. Based on a pamphlet.

Now look at CompTIA Security+. Months of preparation. Six domains. Hundreds of technical topics. Closed-book. Proctored. Real consequences if you fail, you actually have to know things. Costs about $404.

One certifies you can protect enterprise infrastructure from actual threats. The other certifies you read 14 pages about meetings and didn't fall asleep.

The market prices them similarly. Why? Because the market isn't buying competence. It's buying compliance. HR puts "CSM preferred" on job postings. Candidates buy the badge. Hiring managers check the box. Nobody ever circles back to ask: "Did this person get measurably better at anything?"

The answer is built into the business model. It doesn't matter.

Where The Real Money Goes

The certification bodies are the storefront. The consulting firms are the warehouse.

When McKinsey or Deloitte or Accenture or any of the Big Four walks into a Fortune 500 and sells an "Agile Transformation," that engagement runs $5 million to $50 million over two to three years. I've seen the SOWs. I've watched the internal decks. Here's what gets billed:

SAFe Program Consultants. $300-500/hour. Agile Coaches. $200-400/hour. Release Train Engineers. $150-300/hour. Company-wide training. $1,000-$2,500 per head. For hundreds or thousands of employees.

And here's the part that should stop you cold: when the transformation doesn't deliver, nobody gets fired. The scope gets extended. "The culture isn't ready yet." "We need another quarter to embed the practices." "The teams need advanced training." "Leadership alignment requires a Phase 2 engagement."

It's the same excuse Sutherland gave me on LinkedIn, just dressed in a consulting deck. Sixty-five percent of teams fail. And the failure is always attributed to the implementation, never the design. Which means the failure always generates more revenue.

A framework where failure extends the contract isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed.

A federal government contract for SAFe transformation mentoring was recently cut from $1.1 million to $443,000. When the people famous for $400 toilet seats start calling your consulting fees excessive, something has shifted.

The Question That Gets You Deleted

Let me bring this back to where it started.

I asked Pierre Le Manh, CEO of PMI, on his own celebratory LinkedIn post:

If 85% of organizations say agility is critical, but only 32% are satisfied — what does the new manifesto offer that the previous ones didn't?

It's a fair question. He published the numbers. I used the numbers. A four-follower account asking for specifics. He didn't answer it. He couldn't. Because the honest answer destroys the pitch:

The 53-point gap is not a failure. It's the market.

Think about it. If satisfaction ever reached 85%, there'd be nothing left to sell. No new manifesto to launch. No new cert track to add. No new consulting engagement to propose. The $49 billion ecosystem is entirely funded by the distance between "we want to be agile" and "we still aren't."

PMI needs the gap. Scrum Alliance needs the gap. SAFe needs the gap. The consultancies need the gap.

Closing the gap would bankrupt every organization that claims to be working on closing it.

That's not cynicism. That's the spreadsheet.

## What Actually Ships Software

I watched a six-person team at a payments company ship a regulatory compliance module in eleven weeks. No SAFe. No Agile coach. No release train engineer billing $400 an hour to facilitate their standups. One senior engineer who could say no, a product manager with three customers' phone numbers saved in his personal phone, and a CI/CD pipeline that caught problems at 2am. They shipped on time. The team running SAFe in the same building did not.

I've been building banking systems for two decades. I've worked with teams that shipped and teams that didn't. The ones that shipped had things in common, and none of them came from a two-day workshop:

An architect or senior engineer with enough authority to say "no, this is too complex" and actually be heard. Not overruled by a product owner waving a backlog.

A product person who talked to real customers weekly. Not "personas." Not "user stories written by a proxy." Actual humans who use the thing, reporting what breaks.

CI/CD pipelines that caught problems at 2am so humans didn't have to. Automated quality gates. Deploy frequency measured in hours, not sprints.

A manager, or a CTO, or a VP, who understood that their primary job was blocking organizational noise from reaching the people doing the work. Shielding the team from status theater, reporting theater, and ceremony theater.

That's it. That's what works. I've seen it work in fintechs, in legacy banks, in startups, in enterprises.

None of it requires a $1,500 course. None of it expires annually. None of it needs Scrum Education Units to remain valid.

And that's exactly why nobody packages it, certifies it, and sells it. There's no recurring revenue in "hire experienced people and let them work."

But there's $49 billion in "your people need our badge to be effective."

Even when 65% of them won't be.

I've spent twenty five years watching engineers try to fix broken processes. The ones who succeeded had data, allies, and patience. The ones who failed had opinions, frustration, and a retro slot.

Most of them were trapped in what I call Risk Management Theater and didn't even know