The Agile Manifesto and Agile Principles

Project planning involves thinking about how to complete a project within a certain timeframe, usually with defined stages and with designated resources. The success of a project will depend in part on the effort and skill you apply during planning.

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Initial Backlog Ranked for Changes

Project planning occurs at various levels, each providing a different degree of detail and occurring at different times in the project development life cycle.

Roadmap to Value

Agile project planning is cyclical and ongoing, with different types of planning repeated throughout the project life cycle. Project planning is usually either date-driven or feature-driven. In a date-driven - or time-boxed - project, the release date is set but the set of features that will be included in the product release is uncertain.

A project team is updating the web site of QuickTravel, an outdoor adventure company. The team's instructions are to change the site's look and feel, and to add search, reservation, and payment tools. The team knows what to build, but it is not sure why the customer has requested the changes or which functionality is the most important. As a result, the team runs over budget and develops a product that doesn't fully align to the customer's business objectives.

Uncertainty and Compelxity Model

Whereas traditional project management is plan-driven, agile planning is value-driven. Value in this context refers to the financial worth of a project to the customer. The purpose of a business case is to confirm that a project will create value for the customer right from the start. A business case addresses questions about a proposed project's economic, technical, operational, and political impact on the customer.

Relationship between change management and agile

For an agile project, a product vision describes how a product can capitalize on the opportunities and fulfill the goals outlined in the business case. It should provide all stakeholders, including developers, with a common understanding of what's required, without limiting the team's creativity in finding solutions.

Some may think that with an agile methodology, the customer can simply take an "I'll know it when I see it" approach to specifying what's required. However, this would make planning and estimation nearly impossible.

Agile teams are highly responsive to changes in customer expectations and market conditions. However, an agile project isn't without boundaries. Time and money, for example, aren't unlimited - so there have to be some limits on what can change, and the changes can't go on forever.

A project manager defines the scope of a traditionally managed project using a work breakdown structure, or WBS. An agile team, however, defines and manages scope using techniques for capturing requirements, such as use cases.

Use cases provide a big-picture overview of a system and of a project's scope. They can, however, be quite detailed and may not be very suitable for use in planning and estimating. An alternative technique, possibly used in addition to a high-level use case, involves breaking down project requirements into user stories. Each user story describes a specific, required functionality, which is defined from a user's perspective. Together all the user stories for a project provide a detailed description of the project's requirements.

A user story and acceptance criteria

Course project (optional).

You just finished the 4th course of the Agile Project Management - The PMI-ACP (Agile Certified Practitioner) Certification Program.

This one was focused on Agile Planning and more precisely on Project Initiating and Requirements Gathering.

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 

PMI Certification Info

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.

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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