PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)® Workshop

Agile has made its way into the mainstream. Today, more organizations and companies are adopting the Agile approach over a more traditional waterfall methodology, and more are working every day to make the transition. It's increasingly important that project management professionals demonstrate true leadership in today's software projects.

This course will prepare you to lead your next Agile project and helps you prepare for the Project Management Institute Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) certification exam. Achieving PMI-ACP certification clearly illustrates to your colleagues, organizations, and potential employers that you're ready and able to lead in this new age of product development, management, and delivery. Acquiring PMI-ACP certification now will make you one of the first software professionals to achieve this valuable industry designation from PMI.

This class is a stimulating combination of class interaction, active learning exercises, and group collaboration. Each exercise is designed to allow you to learn through practice so that you will be able to immediately apply what you have learned in your work.

What You Will Learn

• Enormous gains available by empowering Agile teams
• Knowledge areas required for the PMI-ACP exam
• Reaching a common understanding of your customer and your customer's needs
• Use an Agile approach to effectively manage a project's schedule, scope, budget, quality, and team
• Tangible, effective methods of team-based planning
• Creating transparent communication among and with customers
• Tips and techniques for project managers to inspire the team to better performance
• Prioritizing methods that will help the team build trust with customers
• Connecting all five levels of planning to create cadence for the team
• Establishing a roadmap for what you want to apply to your team and how success with Agile can be achieved

Audience

• Intermediate-level professionals who need to improve their Agile project management skills and want to earn PMI-ACP certification
• Anyone who is considering using an Agile methodology for software development, including project managers, analysts, developers, programmers, testers, IT managers/directors, software engineers, software architects, software managers, testing managers, team leaders, and customers

Prerequistes

• You should be familiar with the role of Agile in your organization; no advance preparation is required.
• To earn PMI-ACP certification, you must pass the PMI-ACP exam and meet the PMI eligibility requirements for Agile project and project team professional hours. Consult the PMI-ACP application guidelines for full requirements.

Course Outline

1. Understanding Agile Project Management

More than simply a methodology or approach to software development, Agile embraces a set of principles that drive effective software development. Agile focuses on the customer, embraces the ever-changing nature of business environments, and encourages human interaction in delivering outstanding software.

• What is Agile?
• Why Agile?
• Agile manifesto
• Agile principles and how they relate to project management
• Agile benefits

2. The Project Schedule

Agile project managers must do more than simply manage an "up-front defined" schedule; they must be able to continually manage a changing scope against a well-defined project timeline. A dynamic software development environment requires new approaches to schedule management.

• Managing change while focusing on your primary responsibility: delivering the product
• How to determine the project schedule and release plan
• Identifying a team's "velocity" or measure of productivity to more reliably predict when your product will be ready for production
• Five levels of Agile planning and how they work together to ensure the team remains on schedule throughout the project
• Using tools such as burn-down charts and task boards as strategic and tactical measures to closely monitor your team's progress and make corrections as necessary

3. The Project Scope

Software development today is not only complicated but also full of utterly unpredictable variables. In a traditional development approach, these variables lead to missed dates or reduced scope and the never-ending effort to battle scope creep. Utilizing an Agile approach provides a new technique for managing a dynamic scope with the intended outcome being the best-delivered product possible.

• How to conquer the battle over scope creep once and for all
• Consistently delivering what the customer truly needs and wants, not just what might have been initially planned for
• Complex environments and how complexity requires managing within the "Cone of Uncertainty"
• Allowing the customer to always be in charge of the project scope, including making feature trade-off decisions when required

4. The Project Budget

Adhering to a budget is important, but it's not the only financial aspect today's project managers must consider. You must expand your financial management obligations to include return on investment (ROI). Delivering a product that misses defined market needs and fails to produce an active, satisfied user community can easily undermine the value of delivering a project under budget.

• Ensuring your product seeks to maximize ROI after delivery
• Communicating to your customer the metric of work delivered against budget expended (earned value delivery)
• Partnering with your customer to ensure that the value of what is being developed exceeds the investment required to complete it

5. The Product Quality

The best development efforts have little value if you fail to deliver a high-quality product. Agile teams recognize that quality is not a universal, objective measure but is a subjective definition provided by the customer and continually re-evaluated through the course of the project. In addition to paying close attention to your customer's definition of quality, your team must work to ensure highly stable, scalable code that allows future product enhancements without significant recoding efforts.

• Employing product demonstrations to ensure that the team is building what the customer is expecting
• Applying Agile testing techniques in the effort to create high-quality, refactored code
• How to write effective acceptance criteria for identified requirements
• Code reviews, paired programming, and test-driven development

6. The Project Team

Today's project managers must do more than simply manage a project's details; they must coach the individuals on their team. Studies have proven that when a team is happy, its members produce better products more efficiently. The team members' productivity must be tapped in new ways to empower them to improve based on their experiences and abilities to truly collaborate.

• Collaboration essentials
• Managing the individual personalities of the team
• Understanding your coaching style to improve your ability to effectively lead the team
• The Agile project team roles
• Managing distributed teams

7. Project Metrics

It has been said that it is impossible to manage what you don't measure. Agile project managers use metrics to help team members improve performance by providing a reflection of results against the team's action. Metrics must also be used to effectively communicate a project's status to the business and product owner.

• Common Agile metrics
• Taskboards as tactical metrics for the team
• Effectively utilizing metrics to communicate the current state of the project as well as projected delivery date

8. Continuous Improvement

A foundational tenet of the Agile approach is the pursuit of improving the approach based on a team's experience. Agile's non-prescriptive approach requires regular examination to ensure that every opportunity to improve efficiency is recognized and implemented. Without clear plans for continuous improvement, most Agile teams will not make the transition to Agile a lasting one.

• Why continuous improvement must be a part of every Agile approach
• How the team's commitment empowers continuous improvement
• How to effectively use retrospectives
• Why every team member should care about improving

9. Project Leadership

More than simply managing resources and tasks, today's project managers must lead and inspire teams. The project manager's ability to effectively lead a team is based on several sound principles that provide team support while encouraging the team to become more self-sufficient.

• Project leadership over simple project management
• Command and control vs. servant leadership
• Insulating the team from disruption and distraction
• Matching needs to opportunities

10. Successfully Transitioning to Agile Project Management

The course would not be complete without an in-depth discussion on how you can successfully and easily transition to an Agile approach.

• Correlating current challenges to possible solutions
• How corporate culture affects team ability to complete a lasting transition
• Overcoming resistance to Agile early in the adoption process
• Navigating around popular Agile myths

11. A Full Day of Preparation for the PMI-ACP Certification Exam

Building on all of the material covered in class, this final day is devoted to specifically addressing what you will need to do and know to achieve PMI-ACP certification. You will learn about application tips and tricks and test preparation.

• Completing your PMI-ACP application
• How to complete your reservation to take the certification exam
• What to expect on the day of your exam
• In-depth review of each section of the exam, what you will need to know, and how to prepare to pass the exam on your first attempt
• Class review of sample test questions to help prepare for the exam

Course Labs