PMI-ACP Certification: Agile Project Management Essentials

Agile Manifesto and Agile Principles

The Science of Better Learning

This lesson will be very short and very clear. You are going to learn here what Agile project management means. This we can call the starting point, and with this we begin our course on Agile Project Management Essentials. And, please don’t expect more than the essentials in this course, the other courses that form the mentioned Certification Program will come with the rest of the information.

Predictive, iterative, incremental and agile project life-cycles

Agile project management has several key characteristics:

• it relies on cross-functional teams that work in short iterations, and
• uses an incremental approach to development;
• it also focuses on business priorities and customer value, and
• strives for continuous improvement.

Individuals and Interactions versus Processes and Tools

Benefits of agile project management in relation to more traditional management approaches are that it can:

• reduce risk,
• speed up delivery,
• generate more value, and
• reduce the cost of making changes.

The relationship between Agile Manifesto, Values, Principles and Common Practices

In 2001, representatives of different agile software development methodologies met to promote the development of the agile approach. They called themselves the Agile Alliance and drafted the Agile Manifesto which outlines basic values for agile development. In turn, these values are underpinned by specific principles.

The authors of the Agile Manifesto are Kent Beck, Mike Beedle, Arie van Bennekum, Alistair Cockburn, Ward Cunningham, Martin Fowler, James Grenning, Jim Highsmith, Andrew Hunt, Ron Jeffries, Jon Kern, Brian Marick, Robert C. Martin, Steve Mellor, Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland, and Dave Thomas.

Why agile values are important

Twelve agile principles describe the four agile values in more detail. The first six principles are:

• to focus on satisfying the customer
• welcoming change
• delivering working software frequently
• ensuring that business people and developers work together
• motivating the individuals involved in development, and
• using face-to-face communication whenever possible

Traditional project opportunity for change

A development model is a guide to the development process, to help ensure that no important aspects of development are overlooked. Traditionally, development models were highly defined and linear. The trend now is toward more empirical models that include iterative and incremental processes, to provide greater flexibility.

The waterfall (also known as traditional) model divides the development process into five phases:

• Requirements
• Design
• Development
• Testing
• Deployment

Traditionally, a project plan is a document that helps project managers execute and control the phases of a project. It clarifies a project's objectives and how they can be achieved. Information included in a project plan typically includes the project's scope, cost, and schedule, as well as its activities, deliverables, milestones, and resources.

Highly defined and empirical development methods also differ in their approaches to product inspection, and to the adjustments required in response to customers' reviews of deliverables. Consider the differences between two teams that are developing a cell phone service, each using a different model.

The traditional iron triangle of constraints identifies three main types of constraints on the success of a project - scope, cost, and schedule. Change to any one of these constraints will affect the others. The quality of a project depends on satisfying all three constraints.

Agile History

Based on the Agile Project Management model derived by Jim Highsmith, agile project management can be divided into five phases:

• Envisioning
• Speculating
• Exploring
• Adapting, and
• Closing.

Agile vs Traditional project management

Like the agile approach, traditional project management can be described in terms of five key phases. These are:

• Initiating,
• Planning
• Executing
• Monitoring and Controlling, and
• Closing.

Each of these differs in specific ways from the corresponding agile phase.

Agile development avoids the prescriptive, plan-oriented approach associated with traditional project management, and makes use of self-organizing teams. However, it is a common misconception that agile projects don't require project management.

Project management is still necessary. But, the traditional responsibilities of the project manager may be handled differently and possibly be spread out across members of the agile project team.

You can implement agile project management using different methodologies. Although every agile methodology has different characteristics, they all maintain essential agile principles. Three widely used agile methodologies are:

• Scrum
• Extreme Programming - also known as XP, and
• Lean development

Other agile methodologies include the Crystal family of methodologies, Feature Driven Development, or FDD, Dynamic Systems Development Method - or DSDM - as well as Adaptive Software Development - also known as ASD. The methodology you choose should depend on what will best suit a particular project.

Course project (optional)

Congratulations! You finished the The Agile Project Management Essentials course!

After completing the first part of the course - called The Agile Approach -, you are now able to:

• understand the characteristics of agile project management, and why is this important;
• distinguish between primary and secondary agile values, and how this might help you in your work;
• recognize and apply agile principles in your projects;
• recognize and use the differences between defined and empirical methodologies; and
• compare the agile triangle of constraints with that of traditional project management.

This course covers the key exam concepts of Kanban, work in progress or WIP, lead time, cycle time, and Little's Law. You'll also learn about Agile Team Spaces, sharing the product vision, and identifying and reducing defects. 

In Lean project management waste, or the Japanese term Muda, is defined as any activity or process that doesn't add value to a product but does add cost. Lean's original Seven Forms of Waste include transportation, inventory, motion, waiting, overprocessing, overproduction, and defects. The new eighth form of waste is skills or non-utilized talent. 

In a Pull-based system, the customer demand creates what is called pull. Production or development relies on pull rather than on complicated market forecast to determine how many products to deliver.

A Kanban board is a tool that agile teams often use to visualize workflow through a system. While Kanban principles are often used in IT and software development, they can be helpful in any industry.

In lean project management, one of the key concepts is process improvement. Lead time and cycle time are two important metrics that help determine how lean a process is. In other words, how much of the time dedicated to creating a product is value added. 

Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy that focuses on reducing waste and implementing a flow-based production line rather than a batch and queue method. It's aimed at reducing costs and improving overall customer value. 

In order to maintain a stable process with minimal chaos organizations should attempt to minimize work in progress or WIP in their processes. One way to do this is by setting WIP limits. WIP limits help to reduce bottlenecks, improve the rate of throughput, and control the workload levels of project team members. 

Stakeholder engagement is a fundamental part of project management. It's important to be able to express the product vision to stakeholders in order to gain support in common understanding about the product requirements. The product owner often collaborates with other key stakeholders to develop a product vision. 

With today's modern technology there are a variety of tools to bring teams together virtually. 

Agile teams achieve efficiency by leveraging many of the tools from Lean Management, but also by valuing individuals and interactions. 

In this exercise, you'll demonstrate that you can identify characteristics of waste
recognize the relationship between PCE variables identify characteristics of Agile environments 

This course covers the key exam concepts of Kanban, work in progress or WIP, lead time, cycle time, and Little's Law. You'll also learn about Agile Team Spaces, sharing the product vision, and identifying and reducing defects.

PMI Certification Info

After completing 'The Agile Certified Practitioner Training Program (PMI-ACP)', it's time to evaluate your readiness! Dive into the 'Agile Certified Practitioner: PMI - ACP Exam Mastery' on Udemy and ensure you're fully prepared to conquer the exam with confidence.

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