The Agile Certified Practitioner is PMI’s fastest growing certification, and it’s not surprising. As more and more businesses want to adopt proven ways to deliver incremental value faster and with greater customer satisfaction, agile is the way to go.
The PMI-ACP exam outline covers a huge range of agile topics and practices. If you want to pass the PMI-ACP exam and show that you have a competitive edge in the marketplace when it comes to delivering agile projects, you’ll need to fully understand all the relevant domain and keep a PMI-ACP checklist nearby for good measure.
We hear time and time again that a PMI-ACP exam simulator is the tool of choice to help candidates pass the test successfully because it helps you focus on building your skills across a range of relevant agile topics. It’s the perfect supplement for your PMI-ACP course.
But what is covered by the examination? What topics will you be questioned on by a simulator and on your test day? Should I revisit my choice of PMI-ACP books? In this article, we’ll answer the question: “What should I study for PMI-ACP certification?”
The PMI-ACP exam format is a three-hour computer-based test made up of 120 multiple-choice questions. The questions are mapped to the exam content outline domains.
Twenty of the questions are not scored and do not contribute to your test result. These are called pre-test items and are questions that PMI is testing. You won’t know which questions count towards your mark and which are the pre-test items, so answer every question as if it matters because it does! If you still need to grasp the idea a bit more, take a look at this PMI-ACP practice test.
We’ll review each of those domains in more detail a little later in this article.
All the domains are covered by the exam, but the coverage isn’t equal. Certain areas cover more weight than others. Be vigilant and read up on some PMI-ACP exam guides but in the meantime, you can expect the questions on your test to be broken down as follows;
Agile Principles and Mindset | 16% |
Value-driven Delivery | 20% |
Stakeholder Engagement | 17% |
Team Performance | 16% |
Adaptive Planning | 12%
|
Problem Detection and Resolution | 10% |
Continuous Improvement (Product, Process, People) | 9%
|
The first domain focuses on building and fostering agile principles and the mindset to work in an agile environment.
It’s all about advocating for agile principles and supporting the team to use appropriate methods with a common understanding. You can demonstrate a facilitative, collaborative, servant leadership style at work: that’s what this domain seeks to explore and assess.
The agile principles form the foundation of the mindset. Mohammad Alharbi, PMP, PMI-ACP says, “I would recommend you focus on the 4 values and 12 principles by investing most of your preparation effort and time in trying to ingrain, absorb and understand them but more importantly how to practically use them and put them in the right context.”
The important behaviors to reflect on as your approach your examination include:
“At the heart of this domain is the ability for the team to provide incremental delivery, where working features are delivered to the customer one set at a time,” adds Jeff.
The PMI-ACP certification exam will test you on the key tools and techniques to consider in this domain. They include:
Jeff also says it is important to understand how to prioritize work to ensure the portions that deliver the most value get pushed to the front of the project. “Prioritization is aided by specific techniques, such as MoSCoW (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won’t have) and Kano analysis,” he says.
The knowledge and skills required by this domain relate to being able to track progress and ensure the deliverables are fit for purpose.
There are four areas Jeff recommends knowing in detail for the PMI agile exam:
“The popular Waterfall skill of earned value management is used in Agile development,” Jeff says, “but is represented visually by S-curves instead of text reports.”
S-curve data is driven from the amount of scope delivered compared to actual spending. You’ll also use lines for projected progress vs projected spending. This data is helpful to compare how the team is doing compared to how they expected to progress through the project.
If you are already a Project Management Professional (PMP)®, then you’ll be familiar with the concepts and calculations of earned value analysis, and that will help you grasp this skill.
The stakeholder engagement domain is about how you work with other people throughout the project.
Two of the four values of the Agile Manifesto reflect stakeholder engagement in agile approaches. These are:
“In Agile, continuous stakeholder engagement throughout the project life cycle is central to project success,” says Stas Podoxin, PMP, PMI-ACP.
“Unlike traditional (predictive/waterfall) projects, where stakeholders are typically engaged at milestones or gates such as project initiation, kick-off meeting, requirements collection, the start of project execution, project status meetings, handover to operations or customer, closure, and so on, agile projects promote continuous stakeholder involvement and feedback.”
Key activities relevant for this domain include:
You’ll use all of those, and more, as you work with stakeholders on a daily basis, so they are concepts to understand for your job, as well as for your PMI-ACP exam prep.
Interpersonal skills are also important: conflict management, cultural awareness, negotiation, and socio-political awareness will help you build better working relationships with the people on the team and the wider stakeholder community for your project.
“Project deliverables are produced in short cycles via iterations or sprints, so stakeholder involvement happens on a much more frequent basis,” Stas adds. “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. Stakeholder feedback is incorporated as it's received.”
Over recent years we’ve seen an important shift in the way the Project Management Institute -- and all project management thought leadership -- thinks about teams and stakeholders. The leadership role of the project manager is acknowledged and expected, and that’s a good thing!
Leadership skills can help in agile projects, and there is also a focus on collaboration, cooperation and facilitation.
“This domain is about team formation, empowerment, collaboration and commitment,” says Jonathan Hebert, PMI-ACP, PMP.
A core value in the Agile Manifesto is the importance of individuals and interactions, says Jonathan. That’s why it’s important to adequately prioritize the people and how they work together. “Agile projects optimize for delivery,” Jonathan adds, “instead of worrying about resource utilization. We empower the team to do their work by removing roadblocks.”
Key tools and techniques to consider for this domain include:
“Another important area is to make sure the team has a workspace that suits their needs,” says Jonathan. “That could be in the office or virtually.” Fishbowl windows are a technique to support virtual working. “The team opens a video conference screen in the morning and leaves it running all day,” Jonathan explains. “It makes it easy to talk to each other without having to open up another tool.”
Remote pairing works in a similar way. Colleagues can share screens and work collaboratively despite not being in the same room.
Servant leadership is discussed in detail in the Agile Practice Guide, and while it is not specific to agile approaches, it’s particularly appropriate for agile leaders. “Servant leadership is a way of better understanding how the team is working and making it possible for them to excel,” says Jonathan. “That could be through finding a different tool, identifying causes of conflict, coaching and promoting a culture of trust and respect. It’s whatever the team needs to perform to the best of their abilities.”
Agile sizing and estimation refers to how you plan and estimate the work. Techniques like progressive elaboration to determine the size of tasks will help manage the team’s velocity and keep the project moving forward.
It’s also important to take maintenance and operations work into account when planning the project, and capacity planning becomes an important tool for the team.
“I think the key tools and techniques are adaptive and servant leadership, reviews and knowing how to apply them, and all kinds of feedback mechanisms,” says Herbert.
The important skills to consider as part of this domain include:
A lot of the effort in an agile project revolves around finding a sustainable working ‘flow’ as a team, and that’s what the sixth domain covers.
“There are frequently things that disrupt that flow,” says Antje Lehmann-Benz, PMP, PMI-ACP. “This exam domain takes a closer look at what kind of problems that could be, how to find out that they are indeed occurring (as it's not always obvious) and what the causes could be.”
That activity gives you information about problem detection, and there is another aspect to this domain: thinking about problems before they happen.
“Another important topic in this domain is to foresee and maybe prevent certain problems before they occur, or to at least have appropriate responses planned if they do,” adds Antje. “It's the agile version of the risk management domain, if you will.”
The domain also looks at which roles on agile teams are responsible for which aspects of this process, and in which way.
The key tools and techniques practitioners use include:
“Look at the metrics in this domain, such as defect rate, number of escaped defects and cycle time and think about how they relate to the creation of value,” advises Antje. “The higher the first two are and the shorter the third one, the better we are in our value creation while serving our stakeholders. But it also needs to be sustainable and balanced out with effort and cost for implementation.”
This domain does have some overlap with the next one, because the natural outcome of solving a problem is to implement the improvement activity.
This domain is about tailoring and improving the processes and work environment to increase team efficiency. It’s the area of the syllabus you’ll be tested on the least in the exam, but it is still important.
“Learning from past experience to incrementally improve your process, products and services is such a critical component of agile and PMI-ACP, says Yazmine Darcy, PMP, PMI-ACP. “We use this knowledge and skills not only to pass the exam, but in our day to day work.”
Key activities and tools related to this domain include:
All of those help the team to better understand the work they are doing and how they are doing it, so feedback can be used to improve.
“We take time to reflect on lessons learned via formal retrospectives or through more informally asking what we did well or examining areas where we can do better,” says Yazmine. “That means we can be ever more excellent at what we do and offer our customers.”
You can review the whole syllabus in the exam content outline which is available from the PMI website.
The PMI-ACP exam outline is wide-ranging because it challenges practitioners to show they can work with a number of different tools and techniques. Agile practices are diverse, and you need to have a toolbox of options from which to pick the right tools at the right time in your project. Earning your certification will show employers that you have the skills to help them deliver projects in a versatile way.
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