PMI-ACP Certification: Value and Quality in Agile Projects

The Agile Manifesto and Agile Principles

Agile project management is driven by value. During planning and development, every decision is made with the customer in mind - hoping to provide customer value at every step. But one thing that can often undermine this ideal is excessive documentation.

The Science of Better Learning

Quality feedback in an agile project

Documentation effort varies over the length of an agile project, but several documents are crucial to a project's success. Near the start of an agile project, an agile team invests effort in creating the vision statement, project overview, and important requirements documentation. 

For documentation to meet agile guidelines, the benefits of creating it have to outweigh the costs. The documentation also has to be focused, lean, and necessary

Contracts help organizations manage their risks and resources, by identifying limits on what they'll provide and specifying what they agree to accept in return. The contract between a customer and the organization performing a project is a formal, legally binding agreement that should protect both parties.

Although fixed-price contracts are problematic for an agile project, a number of other contract options do work well in an agile context. These include the use of a service contract with a series of fixed-price contracts, cost-reimbursable or time-and-materials contracts, not-to-exceed with fixed-fee contracts, and incentive contracts.

The goal of project risk management is to prevent or minimize the negative impact of risks on a project's success. In an agile context, it involves preventing risks from jeopardizing the delivery of value to the customer.

Testing within sprints

Agile Project Risk Management Tools

Many agile practitioners avoid EVM, considering it too "heavy" for an agile approach and too closely related to traditional project management.

However, with some modifications, EVM can be lightweight and highly effective in an agile context. It can show you how close a team is to meeting initial expectations and enable you to forecast the impact that changes will have.

EVM also uses several other variables and calculations. These include Actual Cost - or AC, Cost Variance - or CV, Schedule Variance - or SV, the Cost Performance Index - or CPI, and the Schedule Performance Index - or SPI.

AC is the total cost actually incurred up to a given point in a project. You obtain this figure by adding up all project spending incurred to date.

In a traditional project, performance metrics may be reported in a chart that plots BAC, PV, EV, and AC.

In this chart, the PV - or baseline - is shown as an S curve. This is because money is spent at a faster rate during the production phase of a project than at the beginning or end of the project.

If a project doesn't meet quality standards, the product it delivers may not be accepted by the customer, and customer satisfaction will suffer. The success, or quality, of a traditionally managed project is defined in terms of how well the project meets time, budget, and scope requirements. In an agile project, however, quality is judged in relation to meeting a customer's needs - and it is recognized that these needs may change over time.

Earned Value in an Agile Context

Quality is important in an agile project, but what is it that quality standards should apply to - for example, just the product, or the team's testing methods? Does quality extend even to how team members communicate with one another?

The term "technical debt" was coined in 1992 by Ward Cunningham, who saw parallels between financial debt and the consequences of taking technical shortcuts in projects.

For example, a team that misses steps or takes shortcuts during software design later has to pay "interest," in the form of extra time and effort spent getting the software to work properly.

Refactoring involves restructuring code, without changing its core functionality. An agile team is encouraged regularly to refactor the code it develops, to simplify it and make it easier to maintain and extend. For example, refactoring may involve removing duplication and reusing proven, optimized code instead of newly written code. This saves effort and reduces technical debt.

Prototyping involves creating an inexpensive model of a product or product feature, such as a user interface. A prototype enables a team to simulate how a product works, assess and experiment with a particular design, and obtain feedback from a customer before further time and effort is invested in product development. This can result in a better quality product, as well as saving time and money once development begins.

In a traditionally managed project, most testing occurs after development work finishes and a completed product is passed to testers or quality assurance staff. In an agile project, however, testing is fully integrated in the development process. Agile developers continually write small amounts of code, test it, and adapt their work based on the results.

In addition to ongoing testing, agile teams use various techniques to build quality into products and to achieve a close-to-zero defect rate. These include:

• refactoring code,
• fixing defects quickly,
• testing and fixing process problems.

This course was focused on Ensuring Delivery of Value and Quality in Agile Projects Agile Project Management and is structured around two main topics:

• Processes Supporting Value Driven Delivery, and
•  Processes Supporting Product Quality.

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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