PMI-ACP Certification: Leading an Agile Team

This is the six course out of eight of the Agile PMI-ACP (Agile Certified Practitioner) Certification Program. This part is on Leading an Agile Team.

1. The Agile Project Leader

Traditional and agile project management roles differ in their approaches to decision making, project planning, and management generally, but both need excellent people management and leadership skills, as well as technical knowledge. An agile project leader should view the customer as a collaborator and focus on continuous improvement throughout a project. The project leader should also serve as both a servant-leader and facilitator, and view a project as a CAS.

2. The agile team

Agile teams are typically cross-functional in their makeup and self-organizing, with members who are empowered to make their own decisions during the development process. Problems in agile teams result from management miscues, including confusion over a project's mission and scope, and team dysfunctions that occur when teams don't follow agile principles.

3. Managing Distributed Agile Teams

Managing a distributed agile team poses particular challenges. To help overcome these, you can focus on creating cross-functional teams, building solid working relationships, using interactive modes of communication, ensuring knowledge sharing between team members, organizing regular meetings at appropriate times, promoting collaboration, and using online collaboration and meeting tools.

4. Coaching an Agile Team

Agile coaches are responsible for developing team and individual performance, and for helping team members apply agile practices in their daily work. Agile coaching occurs at the team and individual levels. At the start and end of each iteration, agile coaching occurs largely at the team level. While an iteration is in progress, individual coaching is most appropriate.

5. Improving Team Performance

You can improve the performance of an agile team by expecting high performance and technical excellence. As project leader, you should also remove obstacles that could hinder high performance, such as an inadequate product backlog, poor engineering practices, and multitasking. 

To ensure that a team can identify and fix problems quickly, you should remove obstacles that could hinder performance, such as individuals working in isolation, a culture of tolerating defects, and a project leader that tries to solve problems for the team. A final strategy you can use to improve performance is to ensure that team members stay energized by eating healthily and taking regular breaks.

This course has two sections: The Basics of Agile Teams and Managing Agile Team Performance.

After completing the section called The Basics of Agile Teams, you will be able to:

• indicate how the role of project manager differs between traditional and agile project management,
• recognize practices that reflect the mindset of an agile project leader,
• recognize the characteristics of an Agile team,
• identify causes of problems on agile teams, and
• recommend strategies for overcoming challenges faced by dispersed agile teams.

After completing the section called Managing Agile Team Performance you will be able to:

• match iteration phases with corresponding coaching activities
• recognize strategies for boosting team performance

Who is your instructor?

My name is Sorin, and I will be your instructor. I am a trainer and project manager with more than 10 years of experience. Before Udemy, I trained hundreds of people in a classroom environment – civil servants, managers, project workers, aid workers and many more. And I managed projects in the fields of justice, corrections, regional development and human resources development.

How will you benefit?

This course is intended for project managers, program managers, or anyone who wants to efficiently participate in agile projects. It is aligned with the Agile Certified Practitioner exam objectives developed by the Project Management Institute® and Certified ScrumMaster learning objectives.

Training videos, examples, exercices and quizzes will help you learn all about the Leading an Agile Team. And, if you take your time to go through all the learning materials this will entitle you to claim 5 PDU’s for the PMI certification exams and to maintain your PMI certification.

So, thank you for considering this course! Now, go ahead, and hit that "Take This Course" button. And, see you on the inside.