How the PMI-ACP Exam Outline Can Help in Your Exam Prep

“Value-driven delivery is about delivering the highest-value portions of the project as early as possible,” says Jeff Furman, PMI-ACP, PMP. There are two reasons you want to focus on prioritizing value:

“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:

“Frequent verification and validation is performed on the deliverables, to prevent the Gulf of Evaluation,” says Jeff. “That’s the difference between what the team thinks the customer wants and what they really want.” This is the process of regularly checking that what is being delivered is in line with the customer’s expectations.

Cumulative flow diagrams are also known as stacked area graphs. “They are used to represent progress graphically, showing work as in progress, remaining, or completed,” Jeff explains. The graphs are a good communication tool, serving to show what work is still outstanding.

“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 S-curves provide lines that describe the scope built, calculated in story points. Story points are used to estimate the difficulty associated with implementing a user story. The higher the number of points, the harder it is to deliver that user story.

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.”

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.