Course Description
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'll 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
Who Needs to Attend
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
Prerequisites
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.
This course is part of the following programs or tracks:
PMI-ACP® - PMI Agile Certified Practitioner
Certified ICAgile Professional
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