Yip, I'm afraid so. First, let me start by saying that I've not been on any agile training course, so what I'm saying is just an extrapolation of my experience, your mileage my vary.
Why do I think that training is a waste of time then? Simple really; training courses can only really take one of two routes. Route one is where you are taught the general principles and route two is where you are taught from case studies or the instructor's own experience.
Now, if you are on a course where the instructor takes route one, you are wasting your time as you can pick up the general principles, from any of the agile methodology web sites, with just a couple of hours reading. If the insturctor takes route two, you are wasting your time because what worked for him, on his projects, may not work for you. The people are different; different engineers, different customers, different dynamics altogether. Hell, what works for you on one project may not work for you on another project, so what chance has the intructor's experiences got of working for you?
So what can you do? The best you can do is to get a good grounding in the general principles of the agile methodolgy you want to use, and then adapt the methodolgy to what works for you from project to project. In other words, you have to be agile :)
Tag:
Scrum,
agile methods