PMI Agile Certified Practitioner

No single method suits every project. You compare Scrum, Kanban, extreme programming and lean, learn how they combine into hybrids, and tailor an approach to the team, product and organization.

• Scrum in depth
• Kanban and flow-based systems
• Extreme programming practices
• Lean product and software development
• Scaling and coordinating several teams
• Tailoring and hybrid approaches

You build An approach recommendation that compares frameworks for one product.

Agile leaders enable rather than direct. You practice servant leadership, facilitate decisions and conflict, remove impediments, and help a team take ownership of its work.

• Servant leadership in practice
• Facilitating meetings and workshops
• Decision-making in self-organizing teams
• Removing impediments
• Coaching and empowering the team
• Leading without formal authority

You build A facilitation plan for a team decision that is stuck.

Teams deliver when they trust each other. You form teams, set working agreements, support psychological safety, handle conflict and growth, and work well across locations and cultures.

• Team formation and the stages of group development
• Working agreements and team norms
• Psychological safety and trust
• Conflict and how teams grow through it
• Distributed and cross-cultural teams
• Measuring team health

You build A team charter with working agreements and a team health check.

Agile works in the open, and so do its stakeholders. You identify who matters, plan engagement, share progress through radiators and reviews, and manage expectations as scope shifts.

• Identifying and analyzing stakeholders
• Engagement and collaboration techniques
• Information radiators and transparency
• Sprint reviews and demonstrations
• Managing expectations and conflicts of interest
• Working with sponsors and executives

You build A stakeholder engagement plan with the information radiators it needs.

Building the wrong thing quickly is still waste. You learn who the customers are, what they need, and how to describe value through personas, journeys and stories.

• Customers, users and personas
• User journeys and story mapping
• Writing user stories with acceptance criteria
• Discovery: interviews, prototypes and experiments
• Minimum viable product and minimum marketable features
• Defining and measuring value

You build A story map with personas for one product.

The backlog is the team’s plan, and it needs constant care. You order work by value and risk, refine items so they are ready, and adjust as the market and the team’s learning change.

• Backlog structure and ownership
• Prioritization methods: MoSCoW, Kano and weighted ranking
• Value, risk and dependency in ordering
• Backlog refinement
• Definition of ready
• Handling changing priorities

You build A prioritized backlog with the method and reasons behind its order.

Agile planning is frequent and light. You plan releases, iterations and daily work, estimate with relative sizing, and use velocity and capacity to make forecasts that people can trust.

• Vision, roadmap, release and iteration planning
• Relative estimation and planning poker
• Velocity, capacity and forecasting
• Spikes and time-boxing
• Planning with dependencies and other teams
• Re-planning when facts change

You build A release plan and iteration plan with forecasts from team velocity.

Value arrives in increments that work. You agree what done means, build in quality through technical practices, integrate often, and show progress through working product.

• Definition of done and acceptance criteria
• Technical practices: continuous integration and test-driven development
• Refactoring and managing technical debt
• Pairing, swarming and collective ownership
• Demonstrating increments and gathering feedback
• Releasing safely

You build A definition of done and a release checklist for a team.

Good metrics inform decisions, and poor ones invite gaming. You track progress with burn charts and flow measures, read cycle time and lead time, and combine delivery data with measures of value.

• Burn-up and burn-down charts
• Cumulative flow diagrams
• Cycle time, lead time and throughput
• Work-in-progress limits
• Escaped defects and quality measures
• Value and outcome metrics

You build A metrics dashboard that shows delivery, flow and value for one team.

Adaptive teams manage uncertainty by shortening feedback loops. You handle risk and impediments in an agile setting, run retrospectives that change something, and sustain improvement over time.

• Risk-adjusted backlogs and risk burn-down
• Handling impediments and escalation
• Retrospective formats and follow-through
• Root cause analysis with the team
• Process improvement and experiments
• Knowledge sharing across teams

You build A retrospective plan with improvement experiments and measures of success.

A simulated product carries the course. You form the team, define value, order and estimate the backlog, run iterations, track flow and lead improvement, then explain the choices you made.

• Forming the team and agreeing how to work
• Building and ordering the backlog
• Running iterations and reviews
• Tracking progress and adapting the plan
• Reflecting on the decisions and results

You build A product increment history with backlog, metrics and retrospectives.