Curs Agile Certified Practitioner PMI-ACP® Exam Prep

Domain: 1. Agile Mindset

1.1 Why agile?

• Industrial work versus knowledge work. Defined versus empirical processes
• Characteristics of the agile mindset
• Professional, team, and organizational agility
• Agile triangle

1.2 Iterative and incremental agile life cycles

1.3 Agile mindset

• The Agile Manifesto
• The principles behind the Agile Manifesto

1.4 Agile frameworks

• Scrum; Extreme Programming (XP); Lean product development; Kanban
• FDD – Feature-driven development; DSDM – Dynamic system development method; Crystal
• Adaptive software development; ScrumBan; Scrum@Scale

Principles of systems thinking

• Systems thinking; VUCA; Stacey matrix ; Cynefin model
• Other systems thinking models
• Design thinking to improve your agile process

Agile suitability tools

• Agile suitability filter tools dimensions: culture, team, project

Agile hybrid models

• Hybrid life cycles as transition strategy
• Mixing agile approaches

1.5 Collaborative team environment

Team vision and working agreements

• Charter the project and the team
• Working agreements

High-performing teams

• The team development model; Stages of team development
• Virtual teams

Retrospectives

• Importance of retrospectives
• Common retrospective problems
• Using retrospectives to shape future work

Collaborative practices

• Collaborative practices; Daily coordination meetings; Sprint planning
• Demos

Characteristics  of Dysfunctional Teams

• Dysfunctions of a team: Inattention to results, Avoidance of accountability, Lack of commitment, Fear of conflict,  Absence of trust
• Five levels of conflict. How do you manage conflict?

Tailoring the agile approach

• The shu-ha-ri model
• Tailoring

Scaling Agile

• Scaling frameworks: Scrum of Scrums, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), LeSS, Nexus, Disciplined Agile®

1.6 Build transparency

• Information radiators
• How do we reduce the risks of distributed teams

Feedback loop for team and/or product owners

• Feedback loop characteristics
• Guidelines for estimating and planning

Communication strategies for colocated and distributed teams

• Global, cultural, and team diversity
• Digital tools for distributed teams

1.7 Foster psychological safety

No-blame culture

• Fear
• Psychological safety
• Exclusion
• The blame game

Safe environment

• Stages of psychological safety
• Stage 1: Inclusion safety
• Stage 2: Learner safety
• Skunk works
• How to promote well-being on teams

Constructive feedback

• Stage 3: Contributor safety
• Stage 4: Challenger safety
• Retrospectives as part of changing a team’s way of working .

1.8 Short feedback loops

Include customers

• Principles 1, 2, and 3 of agile development
• Frequent feedback; IKIWISI; Gulf of evaluation
• Personas, wireframes, and prototypes

Deliver value as often as possible

• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Iterations, demos, and reviews

Tools and techniques

• Design thinking
• Lean Startup methodology

1.9 Embrace change

Promote a growth mindset to respond to change

• Feedback
• Servant leadership; Key responsibilities of servant leads on agile projects

Respond to changing requirements and priorities

• Principles 2, 3, and 4 of the Agile Manifesto
• Prioritizing the backlog
• Backlog refinement

Encourage and model T-shaped skills

• Generalizing Specialists
• T-shaped people

Domain: 2. Leadership

2.1 Empower teams

Establish an environment of trust

• Stages of psychological safety
• Transparency; Daily coordination meeting; Retrospectives; Team charter
• Motivating factors
• Implementing changes with your team

Collective ownership of goals

• Four main strategies
• Team norms; Pairing; Swarming

Training, coaching, and mentoring

• Agile coaching and mentoring
• Coaching at two levels: Coaching and mentoring teams; Coaching and mentoring individuals

Emotional intelligence techniques

• Emotional intelligence
• Leveraging diversity; Political awareness; Communications; Make connections
• Collaboration; Team building
• Leadership; Influential people; Change catalysts
• Conflict management

Nonverbal communication

• Active listening; Levels of listening
• Nonverbal communication: Turning the camera on during video calls; Body language; Tone of voice; Personal space; Discuss expectations; Quiet quitting

Self-assessment tools and techniques

• Shore and Warden self-assessment
• Jean Tabaka’s team self-assessment model
• Stefan Wolpers’ end-of-sprint poll
• Myers-Briggs personality-type indicator
• DISC Profile
• HIGH5 strengths test
• HEXACO personality inventory

2.2 Facilitate problem resolution

Investigate the root cause of problems

• Sampling
• The five whys; Fishbone analysis/Ishikawa diagram/ cause-and-effect diagram
• Kaizen

Resolution strategies with the team

• Engage the team; Get feedback early and often
• Spike
• No-blame culture

Detecting and resolving problems in a timely manner

• Testing types
• Risk-adjusted backlog
• Collaborative games for agile risk management

2.3 Promote knowledge sharing

Capture and share knowledge

• Lessons learned; Retrospectives
• Communities of practice
• Artificial intelligence agents for information sharing

Organizational knowledge assets

• Value delivery office; Project management office;
• Pairing; Dynamic reteaming
• Exit interviews

Knowledge sharing

• Lessons learned
• 20 percent time
• Professional development
• Technical debt . Martin Fowler’s technical debt quadrants
• Refactoring

2.5 Promote agile mindset principles, and practices

Environment for continuous improvement

• Leading by example
• Building a safe and supportive environment
• Rewarding an agile team

Recognize and celebrate agile behavior

• Jean Tabaka’s team self-assessment model; Shore and Warden’s self-assessment
• Feedback form customers and the product owner;  Elicit feedback from your team
• Niko-Niko calendar

2.6 Promote a shared vision and purpose

Agile Project Vision

• Project vision statement
• Design the product box
• The product owner;  Product owner as de facto change control board
• Developing a common vision

Communicate the project vision and purpose

2.7 Conflict management

Root cause and the level of the conflict

• Conflict is inevitable on an agile  team
• Speed Leas’ levels of conflict

Collaborative approach to solve the conflict

• Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument
• Specific skills and attitude
• Dual concern model

Domain: 3. Product

3.1 Refine the product backlog

Clarify the backlog items

• Backlog refinement strategies

Prioritize the backlog item

• Backlog refinement meeting; Progressive elaboration; rolling wave planning
• Refining the backlog

Decompose the backlog items

• Decomposing requirements
• Slicing user stories
• Iteration (sprint) planning

Tools and techniques for agile estimation

• Sizing work
• Story points; Fibonacci sequence; Story point guidelines
• Affinity estimating; T-shirt sizing
• Story map; Product roadmaps
• Wideband Delphi; Planning poker
• The mindset behind estimating and planning for agile

3.2 Manage increments in agile projects

Align product increments with business priorities

• Business value; Risk-adjusted backlog
• Prioritization methods: MoSCoW, Kano, Monopoly money, Ordered list
• Four cognitive biases that threaten project success

Product Increment

• Iterative (sprint) planning
• Release planning key components
• Iteration/sprint planning

Demonstrate increments of value for early feedback

• Demos and feedback
• Frequent verification and validation
• Continuous product improvement

Measure the delivery of value

• Measuring results
• Measurement of value
• Feature chart
• Assessing value: ROI, IRR, NPV
• Using EVM with adaptive projects
• Using Kanban metrics: Throughput and work in process; Lead time and cycle time

3.3 Visualize work

Work visualization techniques

• Kanban boards. General practices of Kanban. Task boards; Work item creation
• Tracking effort; Progress indicator; Velocity
• Personas

3.4 Manage value delivery

Define agile project success

• Defining success factors; Definition of success
• Successful criteria for agile approaches; Success patterns
• Definition of ready (DoR) and different ways to use it

Optimizing  the value increments

• Prioritization factors: Financial value, Cost, New knowledge, Risk
• Relationship between risk and value

Domain: 4. Delivery

Early feedback

• Evaluate customer satisfaction;  Customer satisfaction metrics
• Principles of the Agile Manifesto
• Iteration demo

Small product increments

• Limit rework and scrap by getting feedback early
• Constant minor adjustments
• Maximizing satisfaction for new product releases

Collect and incorporate stakeholder feedback

• Agile  short cadences
• Feedback is only helpful if we act on it appropriately
• Go big by thinking small: the power of incrementalism theory

4.1 Manage agile metrics

Determine which agile metrics are appropriate

• Why do we measure? Leading versus lagging indicators
• Traditional project metrics
• Burndown chart; Burnup chart; Cumulative flow diagram
• Applying earned value management to agile projects

Radiate agile metrics across the relevant audience

• Basic communication model
• Communicating metrics to stakeholders: Information radiators, Rolling up measures

Review and analyze agile metrics

• Review sponsor and customer, product owner, team feedback
• Project measures and the six project controls
• Burndown charts and the six project controls
• Burnup charts and the six project controls
• Cumulative flow diagrams and the six project controls
• Analyzing metrics

Metrics for decision-making

• Velocity; Customer satisfaction score; Defect density
• Eliminating bottlenecks; What is a value stream?

4.2 Manage impediments and risk

Proactively identify risks and impediments

• What is risk? What is risk management?
• Agile is not a risk management approach. Layering risk management into agile. Identifying risks and impediments

Engage the team in risk management

• Planning risk responses; Business value retained
• Spike
• Short iterations
• The agile advantage toward risk management

Prioritize impediment removal and risk mitigation activities

• Put risk responses into the team’s backlog. Residual risk. Secondary risks
• Adjusting the value of a risk response action. Risk-adjusted backlog
• When not to manage a risk

Monitor/control risks and impediments

• Risk retrospectives. Reprioritize the backlog
• Visualizing risks. What is a risk burndown graph?
• Monitoring and mitigating threats through analysis and planning

4.3 Recognize and eliminate waste

Visualize the end-to-end flow of value in the system

• Definitions .  Identify steps and queues in the process
• Process efficiency. Improving the process

Metrics, tools, and feedback loops to identify waste

• Metrics considerations. Useful metrics categories
• Tools

Waste-reduction activities

• Putting waste-reduction tasks in the backlog. Estimating the value of waste-reduction tasks
• Work with the product owner to set priorities; Review the results
• Theory of constraints; Deming cycle; Improving constraints through experiments

4.5 Perform continuous improvements

Metrics and feedback to drive continuous improvements

• Customer satisfaction metrics
• Team satisfaction metric

Improvement actions

• Refactoring
• Improving our process

Evaluate the effectiveness of process improvement

• Measuring process efficiency using a value stream map
• Measuring team engagement
• External reviews and audits
• Woking with your PMO, VDO, or ATO. Using a community of practice
• Use artificial intelligence

4.6 Engage customers

Identify and analyze customers and their needs

• Persona modeling; Interviewing
• Systems thinking; Lean Startup
• Techniques from product management
• Minimum business increments and minimum viable products

Iteration deliverables and acceptance criteria

• Frequent verification and validation
• Testing types
• Test-driven development and test-first development
• Behavior-driven development
• Using test-driven development for non-software projects

Collaboration between the customer and team

• Principles of the Agile Manifesto
• Collaboration ensures our team is building what the customer needs
• Trust: the key for successful delivery using agile approaches

4. 7 Optimize flow

Limit work in progress at all levels

• Why should we limit work in progress?
• Limiting work in progress at different levels: Organization, Department, Team, Individual level

Shield team members from interruptions

• Flow. What is flow? Interruptions increase error rates;
• “What about multitasking …” ; Deflection shield
• Limiting work in progress

Use metrics to analyze and improve flow

• What is work in progress
• Kanban metrics

La sfarsitul acestui training , participantii vor avea cunostintele necesare pentru pregatirea si sustinerea cu succes, din prima incercare, a examenului de certificare Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)^®.

• Persoanele care doresc sa se pregateasca si sa treaca cu succes examenul de certificare ca Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)^® de la Project Management Institute (PMI)^®.
• Nivelul cursului NU este pentru incepatori, ci pentru persoanele cu experienta in aplicarea principiilor agile si in utilizarea de metodologii agile variate.

Pentru a beneficia din plin de acest training recomandam urmatoarele cunostinte preliminare:

• cunostinte avansate privind metodologiile agile
• experinta de min 1 an in project management (conducere de proiecte)
• experiente de min 8 luni in utilizarea medologiilor agile

Nu este o obligativitate, insa recomandam participantilor sa citeasca Agile Practice Guide elaborat de Project Management Institute (PMI)^® inainte de participarea la training.