Course Description
General Description:Agile has made its way into the mainstream – it's no longer a grassroots movement to change software development. Today, more organizations and companies are adopting this approach over a more traditional waterfall methodology, and more are working every day to make the transition. To stay relevant in the competitive, professional world, it's increasingly important that professionals can demonstrate true leadership ability on today's software projects. The Project Management Institute's Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) certification clearly illustrates to colleagues, organizations or even potential employers that you're ready and able to lead in this new age of product development, management and delivery.
This PMI-ACP exam prep training not only prepares you to lead your next Agile project effort, but ensures that you're prepared to pass the PMI-ACP certification exam. This course provides a proven combination of class learning and testing that prepares students for some of the most difficult of testing situations. Questions are designed to allow you to learn through practice so that you will be able to apply what you have learned for the exam.
PMI, PMI-ACP, PMP and PgMP are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
Highlights:- Learn precisely what you will need to know in order to pass the Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI–ACP) Exam
- Understand Agile principles and practices which will transform team performance and improve customer satisfaction
- Acquire valuable insights into how you can empower and inspire your team
- Discover techniques to more actively manage a project's scope to help better ensure the delivery of the best product possible, even if that differs from what was planned
- Learn to better know and collaborate with customers for better results
- Learn the most powerful metrics to employ to ensure that teams continuously improve their development and delivery
- Avoid the pitfalls many teams fall into when adopting Agile practices
- Gain powerful insights, techniques and skills to successfully coach a new or existing agile team
- Arm yourself with the latest industry knowledge on how to manage dynamic projects in the most unforgiving environments
- Learn why studies have shown Agile teams are significantly happier with their work, and ensure this benefit for your own team
Agenda
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
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