I stumbled across an expired Request For Proposal on the Scrum Alliance website. As of today it is posted on their About page as Request-for-Proposal_SalesOperations2017.pdf.
“Scrum Alliance is currently accepting proposals to assist the Corporate Relations team in
establishing a sales operations system of record using Salesforce.com as the CRM platform and
increase selling effectiveness from advisory on recruitment of business development staff to the
establishment of a clear end-to-end sales process and operations.”
If you read it in full it is very interesting. It seems to reveal a business model that goes well beyond “certs and shirts”. Does anyone know more about their business model? Do we as active members (which I can say as of today at least even though I have no plans to continue to fund them) have a right to their financial records, or is there a way to get the information due to their assertion that they are a “nonprofit”?
Side note: I was looking for the number of active cert holders for each cert when I found this RFP. It used to be possible to search their database and get back a total count of records for each query without restriction, and then be able to page through the results regardless of the total number of matching records. I actually mined the CST database once and captured the full records of was was then less than 1,000 CSTs. It is no longer possible to do such searching and scraping as I learned from a Twitter exchange this morning with Ron Jeffries. He was looking for updated stats, I would imagine for a blog post or book. Now one can only get back somewhere between 750 records (fact as of today) and my guess is 1,000 before the system responds with something like “Too many records - please refine your search”. Bummer. Now how am I going to be able to support my bashing of these diluted certifications with statistics and charts?