The Road to being a certified Agile Practitioner (PMI-ACP)
Getting my Agile Practitioner certification seemed like the next right thing to do after a 2-day Scrum Master course that left me intrigued and curious about wanting to know more about the Agile World. The application process went smooth and in a couple of days I was approved to sit for the exam.
As I immersed myself into the resources that PMI recommended that I review to pass the PMI-ACP exam, I found myself looking for more information on this topic. The agile books have a way to draw you in, energize you and leave you feeling empowered to take control of your projects. As the days passed on, I saw myself becoming more and more committed to the mindset required to embody, practice and live Agile principles. I wanted to compare it to the work I was currently doing for my client and look for opportunities to add immediate value.
The Agile manifesto published in 2001 by thought leaders in the software industry summarizes agile as follows:
Individual and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
The path to implement these principles can be varied, and the PMI course exposes you to it all. Whether it is Extreme Programming (XP), Test-driven Development (TDD), Lean Methodology or Kanban, I enjoyed the depth of the material and exposure to a variety of Agile approaches and comparing benefits of the approaches beyond Scrum.
In reflecting on the work that I was doing with my client, I realized that while we were practicing Agile in theory, we hadn’t fully committed ourselves to all that the framework entails. Before my certification we were working in 2-week sprint cycles — doing daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and sprint reviews to gain sign-off from our customer. We hadn’t, however, committed ourselves to the scrum retrospective.
Challenges and frustrations would compound as teams weren’t getting what they needed from each other and didn’t have a forum to share feedback and improve our ways of working. This is an example where an organization prides itself for following the scrum methodology but is reluctant to commit to all that the framework entails. Coaching my client to schedule retrospectives and reflect often on the work we’d completed allowed us to inspect our successes (and pain points) at the end of our 2-week sprint rather than waiting months when everyone had lost fresh perspective.
If organizations want to remain competitive, they need to deliver products fast, focus on frequent feedback within the team and most importantly with the customer.
Once I completed my studies and did my exam and passed with flying colours meaning “above target on all areas”, I learned simply that agile is a mindset and also a choice that a project professional can take to guide how they are going to conduct themselves in a project. Anyone can be a servant leader by taking ownership of the tasks given to them, communicating early and often and removing impediments for their fellow team members. This is how we can get closer to improving the customer experience.
The following are the resources that I would recommend you to use to help you to study for the PMI-ACP exam:
● Effective Project Management Traditional, Agile, Extreme, Hybrid
● Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn
● Cert Prep: PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) by Kelly O’connell.
