Appendix A
Next Steps
The study guide is designed to help you take and pass your PMI-ACP exam. This appendix just contains some thoughts to help you on your way while preparing for your exam. The important thing about preparing for an exam like this is that not only will you have a new certification under your belt, you will also get a great overview of the different frameworks, tools and techniques, and best practices to be Agile in your own work environments.
It’s always best to refer to the recently published Agile Practice Guide, which can be purchased at www.pmi.org, as well as other related materials that can help you successfully pass the exam. It is also important to mention that the exam may be updated several times, but the best practices remain the same.
PMI provides a reference list of numerous books that you can review and can be found here: www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/public/pdf/certifications/agile-certified-practitioner-reference-materials.pdf?la=en.
Attempting to read through all of the 12+ additional books that are recommended can be a difficult endeavor while working full time and studying for an exam. The goal of this study guide is to help you navigate everything that you need to know to take and pass the exam. At the same time, this book is designed to ensure that you are engaging in new best practices or different ways of making whatever philosophies you follow a little bit better.
What Is the PMI-ACP Certification?
The Project Management Institute’s goal in putting together the Agile Certified Practitioner exam is to call attention to the multiple frameworks and best practices involved in projects that utilize an Agile approach. There are many other certification types that are proprietary. For example, the Scrum Alliance (www.scrumalliance.org) has numerous certifications that are applicable to the framework of Scrum, but PMI-ACP is the first certification exam of its kind to combine many best practices across multiple frameworks. The content itself is not company specific or partial to any one framework over another. The content is based on numerous books and best practices surrounding Agile projects.
There are only about 12,000 people in the world to date who are certified in Agile through the Project Management Institute. Compare this to the 700,000+ people in the world who are PMP certified. I expect the number of Agile certified individuals to increase rapidly as soon as organizations recognize the benefits of Agile frameworks or of a hybrid approach that utilizes Waterfall project management with aspects of Agile.
I know that a lot of you might be Scrum (CSM) certified, or that you have gone through other types of training for different Agile best practices. The whole point of this guide is to get you prepared to take and pass an exam that incorporates a lot of different Agile approaches and best practices.
Maybe you have a PMP certification, or you’re trying to get one, or you got the program management certification (PMPg) or a certified associate in project management (CAPM) certification. If you are already certified in something, then you’ve been on the Project Management Institute’s website. If not, there is a wealth of information on all certifications and the included content outlines on the website.
When I took the PMI-ACP exam, I found that all four answers for each question were in some way, shape, or form correct. The key is about getting yourself into the right mindset and choosing the best answer. You can only do that by getting your Agile hats on and making sure that you understand what those frameworks include and what PMI looks at as best practices across multiple Agile frameworks.
To maintain your PMI-ACP® certification (much like a PMP® certification), you’ll have to obtain 30 professional development units, or PDUs (basically 30 hours) every three years based on Agile topics. I read an article recently that basically said that the hybrid of both PMP® and Agile certification is going to be in the top five most-needed or necessary skills over the course of the next five years.
If you’re not familiar with the professional development or PDU process, the best thing to do is to go to www.pmi.org and look at what counts as a professional development unit and how the Project Management Institute’s talent triangle works for professional development.
Real-World Considerations
Simply passing an exam won’t cause your organization suddenly to see the light if they are not currently using Agile approaches regularly. You may have to go through an analysis and design process to get the organization on board. This can be a more difficult prospect than learning the ins and outs of Agile itself as well as guiding your team to an understanding of what the Agile framework looks like.
The following questions are among those that may be applicable in this situation:
- What are the current guidelines and are they working?
- What are the processes that we can utilize to estimate how long things will take or how much work we can accomplish in a sprint or iteration?
- What interpersonal skills can we utilize to manage our team of individuals who are also self-directed?
- What different metrics are we closely following and how do we use those metrics to plan, monitor, and adapt our process?
The big dance is agility, and part of that dance is incorporating continuous improvement in the process by following the guidelines and best practices, and by keeping tabs on how the project is progressing. The Agile Practice Guide, published by PMI in collaboration with the Agile Alliance, addresses many of the concerns teams and organizations face when adapting strategies.
You help your organization by making sure the project and team produce something valuable with minimal defects, managing risk effectively, and mitigating risk using a risk-adjusted backlog, or even a risk register if you prefer. You also help your organization by having a backlog of work that is valuable to the customer and by being able to prioritize the work in such a way that provides value consistently through each sprint/iteration of the project.
Whether you’re planning on getting certified or not, this is all valuable information if your organization is attempting to implement an Agile framework or if you’re already using Agile in some capacity.
The results of an Agile project can be completely intangible, and the scope of work is expected to adapt and change with Agile, so we prepare ourselves for it. This means that continuous improvement is necessary. With Agile (think agility), be malleable in order to improve best practices, products, or services. You are self-driven, self-motivated, and self-managed for sure, but you are also coached in the best practices of the individual frameworks you choose or in a hybrid approach of several.
Work is planned at the last responsible moment with the expectation that things will change. What is interesting is that today more Waterfall or predictive types of projects are incorporating some Agile frameworks, and even the PMP® exam has adapted to accommodate more Agile types of approaches.
A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), Sixth Edition, is inclusive of Agile and tailoring approaches. This will make the PMI-ACP® certification more relevant than it is already. Soon, more people will get certified, and more organizations will be implementing the many best practices available. Agile will improve knowledge work globally.
Tools and Techniques Overview
There are many categories of tools and techniques that can be used across multiple Agile frameworks. Tools and techniques that you could see on the PMI-ACP exam fall under several categories and incorporate many best practices in most, if not all, Agile environments.
As an overview, we will go through all of the tools and techniques categories as well as the recommended best practices in those categories. As we move forward, I will address the “how to” of each as they appear within the context of the processes and best practices. This is a good checklist as well to make sure that you understand the content in the guide for exam purposes.
Agile Toolkit
An overview of the tools that are necessary to effectively manage an Agile project can be helpful in both your studies and your projects. The list below isn’t exhaustive but it does represent the tools every Agile project manager needs to work on and improve upon:
- Agile analysis and design
- Agile estimation
- Communications
- Interpersonal skills
- Metrics
- Planning, monitoring, and adapting
- Process improvement
- Product quality
- Risk management
- Value-based prioritization
PMI Ethical Decision-Making Framework
In order to make the best decisions in a fair and ethical manner, it is best to follow the four “A”s:
- Assessment
- Alternatives
- Analysis
- Application
Source: www.pmi.org/about/ethics/code
Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct
Any person who is in the process of certification or is certified will need to read, agree to, and abide by the code of ethics and professional conduct.
- The code has both aspirational and mandatory standards.
- It focuses on responsibility, respect, fairness, and honesty.
The code applies to the following individuals:
- Nonmembers who hold a PMI certification
- Nonmembers who apply to commence a PMI certification process
- Nonmembers who serve PMI in a volunteer capacity
Source: www.pmi.org/about/ethics/code
Task Overview
There are many best practices in an Agile environment that may be relevant to your current or future projects. Think of the following as a checklist, or high-level overview of tasks and best practices to consider. The following overview is also the exam content outline for review of all domains.
Source: PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP®) Examination Content Outline© 2014. Project Management Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.
Agile Principles and Mindset Considerations
The principles and mindset considerations are important aspects to consider putting yourself in the right mindset for both the exam and when implementing Agile best practices.
- Explore, embrace, and apply Agile principles and the Agile mindset within the context of the project team and organization.
- Advocate for Agile principles by modeling those principles and discussing Agile values to develop a shared mindset across the team as well as between the customer and the team.
- Help ensure that everyone has a common understanding of the values and principles of Agile and a common knowledge around the Agile practices and terminology being used in order to work effectively.
- Support change at the system or organization level by educating the organization and influencing processes, behaviors, and people to make the organization more effective and efficient.
- Practice visualization by maintaining highly visible information radiators showing real progress and real team performance thereby enhancing transparency and trust.
- Contribute to a safe and trustful team environment by allowing everyone to experiment and make mistakes so that each individual can learn and continuously improve the way he or she works.
- Enhance creativity by experimenting with new techniques and process ideas and discover more efficient and effective ways of working.
- Encourage team members to share knowledge by collaborating and working together thereby lowering risks around knowledge silos and reduce bottlenecks.
- Encourage emergent leadership within the team by establishing a safe and respectful environment in which new approaches can be tried in order to make improvements and foster self-organization and empowerment.
- Practice servant leadership by supporting and encouraging others in their endeavors so that they can perform at their highest level and continue to improve.
Value-Driven Delivery
Deliver valuable results by producing high-value increments for review, early and often, based on stakeholder priorities. Have the stakeholders provide feedback on these increments, and use this feedback to prioritize and improve future increments.
Define Positive Value
The goal of any Agile project is to deliver value early and often so it is important to define positive value in a way that can be discussed and executed upon.
- Define deliverables by identifying units that can be produced incrementally to maximize their value to stakeholders while minimizing non-value-added work.
- Refine requirements by gaining consensus on the acceptance criteria for features on a just-in-time basis thereby delivering value.
- Select and tailor the team’s process based on project and organizational characteristics as well as team experience to optimize value delivery.
Avoid Potential Downsides
Even the best plans don’t always work out but if small releases are planned with effective feedback the downsides can be minimized.
- Plan for small, releasable increments by organizing requirements into minimally marketable features/minimally viable products to allow for the early recognition and delivery of value.
- Limit increment size and increase review frequency with appropriate stakeholders in order to identify and respond to risks early on and at minimal cost.
- Solicit customer and user feedback by reviewing increments often in order to confirm and enhance business value.
Prioritization
Performing valuable work means prioritizing what is most important to work on and what is considered valuable at the time.
- Prioritize the units of work through collaboration with stakeholders in order to optimize the value of the deliverables.
- Perform frequent review and maintenance of the work results by prioritizing and maintaining internal quality in order to reduce the overall cost of incremental development.
- Continuously identify and prioritize the environmental, operational, and infrastructure factors in order to improve the quality and value of the deliverables.
Incremental Development
Agile development is based on iterative and incremental development of a result. Rather than preplanning everything, small, incremental plans are created and executed upon with feedback in between.
- Conduct operational reviews and/or periodic checkpoints with stakeholders in order to obtain feedback and corrections to the work in progress and planned work.
- Balance development of deliverable units and risk-reduction efforts by incorporating both value-producing and risk-reducing work into the backlog in order to maximize the total value proposition over time.
- Reprioritize requirements periodically in order to reflect changes in the environment and stakeholder needs or preferences in order to maximize the value.
- Elicit and prioritize relevant nonfunctional requirements (such as operations and security) by considering the environment in which the solution will be used in order to minimize the probability of failure.
- Conduct frequent reviews of work products by performing inspections, reviews, and/or testing in order to identify and incorporate improvements into the overall process and product/service.
Stakeholder Engagement
Engage current and future interested parties by building a trusting environment that aligns their needs and expectations and balances their requests with an understanding of the cost/effort involved. Promote participation and collaboration throughout the project life cycle and provide the tools for effective and informed decision making.
Understand Stakeholder Needs
If your team understands the needs of the stakeholders, it is far easier to produce what it is they are asking for and helps engage them in the process.
- Identify and engage effective and empowered business stakeholder(s) through periodic reviews in order to ensure that the team is knowledgeable about stakeholders’ interests, needs, and expectations.
- Identify and engage all stakeholders (current and future) by promoting knowledge sharing early and throughout the project to ensure the unimpeded flow of information and value throughout the life span of the project.
Ensure Stakeholder Involvement
Without the involvement of your stakeholders you would never know if you were building the increment correctly or building the increment they want. By involving the stakeholders at multiple points, your team can ensure they have the best information at the time.
- Establish stakeholder relationships by forming a working agreement among key stakeholders in order to promote participation and effective collaboration.
- Maintain proper stakeholder involvement by continually assessing changes in the project and organization in order to ensure that new stakeholders are appropriately engaged.
- Establish collaborative behaviors among the members of the organization by fostering group decision making and conflict resolution in order to improve decision quality and reduce the time required to make decisions.
Manage Stakeholder Expectations
Having a shared vision is an important aspect of providing value to the organization and to the stakeholders.
- Establish a shared vision of the various project increments (products, deliverables, releases, iterations) by developing a high-level vision and supporting objectives in order to align stakeholders’ expectations and build trust.
- Establish and maintain a shared understanding of success criteria, deliverables, and acceptable trade-offs by facilitating awareness among stakeholders in order to align expectations and build trust.
- Provide transparency regarding work status by communicating team progress, work quality, impediments, and risks in order to help the primary stakeholders make informed decisions.
- Provide forecasts at a level of detail that balances the need for certainty and the benefits of adaptability in order to allow stakeholders to plan effectively.
Team Performance
Create an environment of trust, learning, collaboration, and conflict resolution that promotes team self-organization, enhances relationships among team members, and cultivates a culture of high performance.
Team Formation
Agile project management embraces self-directed and self-managed teams. That doesn’t mean that the team arrives that way when they first begin to work on an Agile project.
- Cooperate with the other team members to devise ground rules and internal processes in order to foster team coherence and strengthen team members’ commitment to shared outcomes.
- Help create a team that has the interpersonal and technical skills needed to achieve all known project objectives in order to create business value with minimal delay.
Team Empowerment
Empowering your team is necessary to be able to encourage self-direction and self-management.
- Encourage team members to become generalizing specialists in order to reduce team size and bottlenecks and to create a high-performing cross-functional team.
- Contribute to self-organizing the work by empowering others and encouraging emerging leadership in order to produce effective solutions and manage complexity.
- Continuously discover team and personal motivators and demotivators in order to ensure that team morale is high and team members are motivated and productive throughout the project.
Team Collaboration and Commitment
Collaboration and commitment are two of the keystones of Agile project management.
- Facilitate close communication within the team and with appropriate external stakeholders through colocation or the use of collaboration tools in order to reduce miscommunication and rework.
- Reduce distractions in order to establish a predictable outcome and optimize the value delivered.
- Participate in aligning project and team goals by sharing project vision in order to ensure that the team understands how their objectives fit into the overall goals of the project.
- Encourage the team to measure its velocity by tracking and measuring actual performance in previous iterations or releases in order for members to gain a better understanding of their capacity and create more accurate forecasts.
Adaptive Planning
Produce and maintain an evolving plan, from initiation to closure, based on goals, values, risks, constraints, stakeholder feedback, and review findings.
Levels of Planning
The ability to plan at multiple levels and adapt as needed is the crux of Agile project management.
- Plan at multiple levels (strategic, release, iteration, daily), creating appropriate detail by using rolling wave planning and progressive elaboration to balance predictability of outcomes with ability to exploit opportunities.
- Make planning activities visible and transparent by encouraging participation of key stakeholders and publishing planning results in order to increase commitment level and reduce uncertainty.
- As the project unfolds, set and manage stakeholder expectations by making increasingly specific levels of commitments in order to ensure common understanding of the expected deliverables.
Adaptation
Practicing agility allows the team to adapt to changing environments.
- Adapt the cadence and the planning process based on results of periodic retrospectives about characteristics and/or the size/complexity/criticality of the project deliverables in order to maximize the value.
- Inspect and adapt the project plan to reflect changes in requirements, schedule, and budget and to reflect shifting priorities based on team learning, delivery experience, stakeholder feedback, and defects in order to maximize business value delivered.
Agile Sizing and Estimation
Planning is different in an Agile project as compared to a Waterfall preplanned project, therefore estimation and sizing of work needs to be adaptable and relevant to the work itself.
- Size items by using progressive elaboration techniques in order to determine likely project size independent of team velocity and external variables.
- Adjust capacity by incorporating maintenance and operations demands and other factors in order to create or update the range estimate.
- Create initial scope, schedule, and cost range estimates that reflect current high-level understanding of the effort necessary to deliver the project in order to develop a starting point for managing the project.
- Refine scope, schedule, and cost range estimates that reflect the latest understanding of the effort necessary to deliver the project in order to manage the project.
- Continuously use data from changes in resource capacity, project size, and velocity metrics in order to evaluate the estimate to complete or ETC.
Problem Detection and Resolution
Every project will have risk events and problems. How the team identifies and works through those problems will determine whether the project was successful or not.
- Continuously identify problems, impediments, and risks; prioritize and resolve in a timely manner; monitor and communicate the problem resolution status; and implement process improvements to prevent them from occurring again.
- Create an open and safe environment by encouraging conversation and experimentation in order to surface problems and impediments that are slowing the team down or preventing its ability to deliver value.
- Identify threats and issues by educating and engaging the team at various points in the project in order to resolve them at the appropriate time and improve processes that caused issues.
- Ensure that issues are resolved by appropriate team members and/or reset expectations in light of issues that cannot be resolved in order to maximize the value delivered.
- Maintain a visible, monitored, and prioritized list of threats and issues in order to elevate accountability, encourage action, and track ownership and resolution status.
- Communicate status of threats and issues by maintaining a threat list and incorporating activities into a backlog of work in order to provide transparency.
Continuous Improvement
Learning and improving is part of practicing agility.
- Continuously improve the quality, effectiveness, and value of the product, the process, and the team.
- Tailor and adapt the project process by periodically reviewing and integrating team practices, organizational culture, and delivery goals in order to ensure team effectiveness within established organizational guidelines and norms.
- Improve team processes by conducting frequent retrospectives and improvement experiments in order to continually enhance the effectiveness of the team, project, and organization.
- Seek feedback on the product by incremental delivery and frequent demonstrations in order to improve the value of the product.
- Create an environment of continued learning by providing opportunities for people to develop their skills in order to develop a more productive team of generalizing specialists.
- Challenge existing process elements by performing a value stream analysis and removing waste in order to increase individual efficiency and team effectiveness.
- Create systemic improvements by disseminating knowledge and practices across projects and organizational boundaries in order to avoid reoccurrence of identified problems and improve the effectiveness of the organization as a whole.
Tools and Techniques Overview
You may be tested on all of the tools or techniques. The following is a good list of the tools and techniques to review to make sure that you understand them. These tools and techniques are found in the PMI-ACP Exam Content Outline.
Source: PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP®) Examination Content Outline© 2014. Project Management Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.
Agile Analysis and Design, including but not limited to the following tools and techniques:
- Product road map
- User stories/backlog
- Story maps
- Progressive elaboration
- Wireframes
- Chartering
- Personas
- Agile modeling
- Workshops
- Learning cycle
- Collaboration games
Agile Estimation, including but not limited to the following tools and techniques:
- Relative sizing/story points/T-shirt sizing
- Wide-band Delphi/planning poker
- Affinity estimating
- Ideal time
Communications, including but not limited to the following tools and techniques:
- Information radiator
- Team space Agile tooling
- Osmotic communications for colocated and/or distributed teams
- Two-way communications (trustworthy, conversation driven)
- Social media-based communication
- Active listening
- Brainstorming
- Feedback methods
Interpersonal Skills, including but not limited to the following tools and techniques:
- Emotional intelligence
- Collaboration
- Adaptive leadership
- Servant leadership
- Negotiation
- Conflict resolution
Metrics, including but not limited to the following tools and techniques:
- Velocity/throughput/productivity
- Cycle time
- Lead time
- EVM for Agile projects
- Defect rate
- Approved iterations
- Work in progress
Planning, Monitoring, and Adapting, including but not limited to the following tools and techniques:
- Reviews
- Kanban board
- Task board
- Timeboxing
- Iteration and release planning
- Variance and trend analysis
- WIP limits
- Daily stand-ups
- Burn down/up charts
- Cumulative flow diagrams
- Backlog grooming/refinement
- Product-feedback loop
Process Improvement, including but not limited to the following tools and techniques:
- Kaizen
- The 5 whys
- Retrospectives, intraspectives
- Process tailoring/hybrid models
- Value stream mapping
- Control limits
- Premortem (rule setting, failure analysis)
- Fishbone diagram analysis
Product Quality, including but not limited to the following tools and techniques:
- Frequent verification and validation
- Definition of done
- Continuous integration
- Testing, including exploratory and usability
Risk Management, including but not limited to the following tools and techniques:
- Risk adjusted backlog
- Risk burn down graphs
- Risk-based spike
- Architectural spike
Value-Based Prioritization, including but not limited to the following tools and techniques:
- ROI/NPV/IRR
- Compliance
- Customer-valued prioritization
- Requirements reviews
- Minimal viable product (MVP)
- Minimal marketable feature (MMF)
- Relative prioritization/ranking
- MoSCoW
- Kano analysis
Knowledge and Skills
A large part of the effective management of Agile projects and the Agile tools and techniques is driven by knowledge and skills in a variety of areas. Part of the Project Management Institute’s exam content outline defines knowledge and skills that are necessary to implement the tools and techniques effectively.
As an overview, you’ll go through the knowledge and skills, and as you work through each chapter in this book, you will see that I have addressed the tools, techniques, and knowledge and skills not only to help you pass the exam, but to help you implement your current Agile projects as well.
Each statement is preceded implicitly by Knowledge of or Skill in the following areas:
- Agile values and principles
- Agile frameworks and terminology
- Agile methods and approaches
- Assessing and incorporating community and stakeholder values
- Stakeholder management
- Communication management
- Facilitation methods
- Knowledge sharing/written communication
- Leadership
- Building Agile teams
- Team motivation
- Physical and virtual colocation
- Global, cultural, and team diversity
- Training, coaching, and mentoring
- Developmental mastery models (for example, Tuckman, Dreyfus, Shu Ha Ri)
- Self-assessment tools and techniques
- Participatory decision models (for example, convergent, shared collaboration)
- Principles of systems thinking (for example, complex adaptive, chaos)
- Problem solving
- Prioritization
- Incremental delivery
- Agile discovery
- Agile sizing and estimation
- Value-based analysis and decomposition
- Process analysis
- Continuous improvement
- Agile hybrid models
- Managing with Agile KPIs
- Agile project chartering
- Agile contracting
- Agile project accounting principles
- Regulatory compliance
- PMI’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct
Source: PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP®) Examination Content Outline© 2014. Project Management Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.
Concluding Thoughts
Remember, this is more than about passing an exam: It is about learning best practices that you can take with you anywhere. Perfect practice makes perfect! As you gear up for your exam, always check out the latest information on www.pmi.org for any content updates, exam changes, and date adjustments. Take and retake the practice exams, read other books on the topics found here, and enjoy your agility!
Best of luck on your exam!