PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)® Exam Prep

Explore project management fundamentals, including the definition of a project, the distinction between projects and operations, and an overview of program management, portfolio management, and the PMI ACP exam.

Define a project as a temporary effort with a definite start and end that creates a unique product, service, or result, such as new research, documents, or opportunities.

Differentiate projects from factory operations by showing how projects conclude after meeting requirements, while operations continue to support a business and are handed over to operations teams.

Define project management as applying skills within process groups and knowledge areas to guide initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and controlling, and closing to meet project requirements.

Program management groups related projects with commonality to deliver greater value, and may include ongoing operations; not all projects belong to a program, but every program comprises projects.

Identify how an organization's project portfolio captures all investments in projects and programs, aligning strategic goals with value to prioritize and plan yearly initiatives.

Prepare for the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) exam by studying the seven domains, 13 subdomains, and 62 tasks outlined in the Agile Certified Exam Outline on the PMI website.

Explore the seven PMI-ACP domains: begin with agile principles and mindsets, then value driven delivery with stakeholder feedback, and engage stakeholders to build trust.

Explore domains five and six: adaptive planning and problem detection and resolution, focusing on identifying issues and risks and how to resolve them to improve performance.

Explore the continuous improvement domain, driving quality, effectiveness, and value across product, processes, and team throughout the project lifecycle, as preparation for the PMI-ACP exam.

Define projects and distinguish them from factories and operations, and explain project, program, and portfolio management. Preview the ACP exam structure and how upcoming chapters will cover it.

Explore agile methodology and the Agile Manifesto for PMI-ACP exam prep. Explore Scrum, Kanban, scaled agile, and disciplined agile delivery within the framework.

Explore how agile embodies a mindset of values and principles from the Agile Manifesto, focusing on delivering working product batches quickly within a cyclical improvement schedule.

Learn how the agile movement emerged from the 2001 Snowbird gathering of 17 developers, birthing the manifesto to deliver timely, tangible value and move beyond waterfall.

Explore the agile manifesto's core values, emphasizing individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responsiveness to change over processes, documentation, contract negotiation, and rigidity.

Begin exploring the twelve agile principles as they apply to core components, and start a guided walkthrough of each principle in this PMI-ACP exam prep course.

Prioritize customer satisfaction with early, continuous delivery of valuable software, balancing speed and value. Embrace late changes and harness agile inspection and adaptation for competitive advantage.

Deliver working software frequently to provide customer value, using shorter cycles from weeks to months. Foster daily collaboration between business people and developers to enable rapid feedback and changes.

Empower self-managing teams in an agile environment to boost project progress, and prioritize face-to-face communication as the most effective way to share information with customers and the team.

Use working software as the primary measure of progress to gauge agile success, and sustain development with a constant, manageable pace that supports morale and safety.

Maintain continuous attention to technical excellence and good design to enhance agility and quality. Emphasize simplicity by doing less, speeding delivery, and keeping the customer satisfied.

Self-organizing teams produce the best architectures, requirements, and designs based on customer input and team structure. Regular reflection and continuous improvement boost delivery speed and morale.

Explore different types of agile frameworks and methodologies, including popular approaches. Scrum remains the most popular agile framework, with multiple other agile types actively used.

Scrum is the most popular agile framework for addressing complex adaptive problems by delivering high-value products through adaptive solutions, with sprint cycles that include planning, development, testing, review, and improvement.

ScrumBan blends Scrum and Kanban to manage work in small iterations, visualized on a board with columns like not started, started, and completed.

Explore scaled agile frameworks such as SAFe and disciplined agile delivery, guiding large-scale programs with multiple teams and trains, and selecting Kanban and other methods for PMI-ACP exam prep.

Revisit the agile mindset by summarizing the agile manifesto and the 12 agile principles, and identify key types of agile frameworks.

Advocate agile principles across organizations, build a common understanding of agile values, and foster self-organization, empowerment, and servant leadership to boost team collaboration, information radiators, organizational effectiveness, and continuous improvement.

Advocate for agile principles by developing an agile mindset, fostering collaboration within teams and across the organization, and delivering value that keeps customers happy and employees and teams motivated.

Establish an understanding of agile values to drive project success, focusing on individuals and interactions over processes and tools, including roles, cadence, definition of done, story elements, and acceptance criteria.

Establish cross-functional, customer and value focused agile teams with a clear purpose and open communication. Empower self-managing teams through a unified vision and regular learning periods.

Learn how visualization and information radiators reveal team health, release status, and bottlenecks through large visual charts, enabling stakeholders and teams to see progress at a glance.

Drive continuous improvement in agile by holding regular team reviews to identify sustainable, adaptable solutions everyone agrees on and welcomes input from all members.

Identify opportunities in a process workflow, outline steps, and highlight issues to drive improvement, then plan, change, execute, and review for ongoing refinement.

Experiment with new techniques and process ideas to reduce uncertainty and foster healthy agile practice, using sprints and retrospectives to test, evaluate, and adopt or discard ideas.

Team collaboration drives agile value by sharing tools and information to deliver customer results. It focuses on awareness, articulation, and appropriation to coordinate work and adapt methods.

collaborative teams reduce risk and boost efficiency by sharing knowledge, recognizing risks early, and streamlining handoffs, integration points, testing, and quality analysis for continuous improvement.

See how self-organization and empowerment enable teams to collaboratively select and prioritize work, plan sprints, fail early and fail often, adjust velocity and wip, and use retrospectives for improvement.

Explore servant leadership, prioritizing others' needs over personal gain, emphasizing service and the growth and well-being of people, rooted in Robert Greenleaf's work and the Greenleaf Center.

Explore servant leadership as a philosophy and set of practices that enriches individuals and creates a more just, caring world, with focus on personal leadership for the PMI-ACP exam.

Explore the ten Greenleaf principles of servant leadership—listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, contextualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to growth, and community—applied to agile project management.

Review chapter three highlights agile principles, values, information radiators, continuous improvement, experimentation, and team collaboration, emphasizing self-organization and servant leadership as foundations for agile projects.

Explore value-driven delivery through incremental, just-in-time production, clarifying MRF and MVP in Agile, defining team processes, managing risks, and prioritizing value with regular retrospectives and nonfunctional requirements.

Deliver usable releases early, with each iteration building on the previous one. Value from the first iteration grows with each release, guiding the final product to match customer needs.

Embrace just-in-time delivery to boost efficiency and reduce deployment waste by iteratively building the product with customer and developer collaboration, focusing on current iteration backlog.

Define the team's process to apply the agile team theory, based on Bruce Tuchman's model, where teams progress through forming, storming, norming, and performing, shaping project outcomes.

Teams transition through forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning, guided by the Scrum Master to define roles and pursue a shared vision.

Learn how the minimum viable product (MVP) delivers value to customers with minimal effort to gain validated learning, then iterate based on feedback.

Identify and respond to risk by assessing the probability and impact of undesirable outcomes for all projects, and iteratively mitigate risks in agile environments.

Collaborate across teams to identify risks early through planning and shared knowledge, while deep customer involvement, transparency, and regular retrospectives expose risks and prevent them.

Regular retrospectives invite the team to reflect on recent events, brainstorm actions, and decide how to improve performance, morale, and project backlog by answering what to continue, stop, and start.

Prioritize the work in agile projects by the team deciding the order of requirements to stay within schedule, scope, and budget, using Moskow prioritization, keto model, and relative weight.

Apply the MoSCoW prioritization technique to classify features into must have, should have, could have, and won't have, guiding agile product planning for PMI-ACP exam prep.

Apply the Kano prioritization technique to rank features by customer satisfaction, using basic thresholds, performance, and delight categories, and paired comparison surveys to shape a roadmap.

Use the relative weight prioritization technique to balance feature value, cost, and risk. Apply the formula (benefit score + penalty score) / (cost score + risk score) for quarterly prioritization.

Stakeholders assign weights to criteria—customer value, business impact, cost, and risk—before scoring features, turning the scorecard into a final priority score.

Quality drives Agile project management by ensuring features fulfill stakeholder needs, with the entire team delivering through regular demonstrations and retrospectives to bake in continuous improvement and higher quality.

Explore quality techniques such as test driven development, refining work to reduce complexity, care programming (pair programming), peer review, and continuous integration to catch issues early in agile projects.

Explore environmental, operational, and infrastructure factors that shape an agile organization, promoting change and innovation while enabling flexibility across the software development lifecycle and agile operations.

Learn to fail fast and improve with phase checkpoints that review progress using retrospective feedback and guide next steps after milestones, while regular status reviews verify cost and quality.

Explore the total value proposition, defined by the customer value formula value equals benefits minus costs, increase value by raising benefits or ROI, driven by team performance, ownership, and purpose.

Reprioritize backlog to maximize business value by conducting regular retrospectives to validate value and adjust priorities, focusing on epic-level value and refining with stories as needed.

Nonfunctional requirements (NFRs) describe system attributes, alongside functional requirements expressed as user stories. Prioritize NFRs—security, usability, speed, reliability, availability, portability, scalability, and maintainability—through agile projects.

Adopt an agile, iterative approach with small cycles to drive improvements in process, product, and service, through frequent meetings that share issues, celebrate successes, and reflect improvements in customer deliverables.

Explore incremental production and MVP-driven processes, just-in-time delivery, risk identification and response, regular retrospectives, and prioritization of unit work quality and non-functional hours to maximize value in an agile environment.

Engage stakeholders by clarifying interests and expectations, sharing knowledge, and establishing a working agreement, while managing changes, resolving conflicts, and aligning team forecasts and communication for agile projects.

Engage stakeholders actively to align interests, needs, and expectations in agile projects. Product owners collaborate with developers, and progress is shown by information radiators to guide Scrum masters and managers.

Identify stakeholders early through team brainstorming, surveys, or investigations; build a stakeholder register and data point map to visualize positive or negative expectations and high or low importance for success.

Plan stakeholder engagement based on mapped needs and expectations, highlighting agile projects' higher involvement through product owner updates and feedback, then manage and monitor engagement using soft skills and experience.

Leverage knowledge sharing as a core agile resource by empowering teams and stakeholders through informal and formal exchanges, enabling planning, releases, and proactive risk management across the project lifecycle.

Foster knowledge sharing in a flat, trust-based organization and reward open communication. Hold regular stand-ups in small teams and use in-person meetings or tools like Zoom and Teams to share the project vision with remote members.

craft a team and stakeholder working agreement to define expectations, collaboration, and success for continuous improvement; use transparency and brainstormed elements to guide decisions and resolve disagreements.

Explore agile change management that encourages evolving requirements through stakeholder feedback, full team demos, and embedded product owners with just-in-time modeling.

Improve group decision making and conflict resolution through transparent, collaborative agile cycles, with stakeholders updated as issues are detected, defined, decided, and deployed by the scrum master or project manager.

Define and align the agile product vision and project objectives from high level to tactical levels, linking daily stand ups to sprint and release planning and enabling inspect-and-adapt practices.

Align a goal-driven agile team by clarifying each member's role and tasks, then review progress in daily stand-ups to ensure accountability and shared sprint goals.

Align expectations with the client by defining a clear scope and vision. Hold frequent retrospectives and demonstrations, refresh the roadmap, and prune stale backlog items based on feedback.

Drive agile adoption by strengthening stakeholder communication through lean coffee talks and product owner communities of practice, fostering buy-in and collaboration across teams.

Use scrum events like sprint reviews and daily standups to provide stakeholder insights, while avoiding expert reviews; ensure team agreement for passive attendance and post-meeting follow-up.

Facilitate stakeholder communication with quarterly retrospectives and unique sprint data reports, clarifying that velocity varies by team and should not be compared, while offering training and context for stakeholders.

Release notes in advance inform high-level epic stories and invite frequent stakeholder feedback. Recruit a stakeholder ambassador to liaise with stakeholders and provide leadership exposure through story writing and prototyping.

Forecasts use historical team data to estimate future outcomes and present predictions as ranges. Prioritize the backlog and weigh points, cost, time to market, and benefits.

Forecast agile delivery by combining story points and team velocity with scope and optimistic/pessimistic estimates. Display the forecast on a radiator to share transparency with stakeholders and sustain project cadence.

Review chapter five topics on stakeholder interests, needs, expectations, knowledge sharing, working agreements, and agile forecasting to align communication and project goals.

Explore domain four: team performance, embracing coherence, development, high performance, cross-functional teams, and self-organization. Improve morale, co-location, communication, and strategies to avoid distractions, along with team vision and performance measurements.

Foster team coherence by addressing culture, time zones, language, and distance, and align with agile pillars that favor individuals and interactions, face-to-face communication, and self-organizing teams.

Develop cohesive teams by practicing continuous improvement through regular ceremonies, daily collaboration, and stakeholder engagement. Retrospectives boost morale, trust, and shared knowledge within the team.

Build high performing cross-functional teams by aligning defined roles and goals with project and enterprise priorities, guided by servant leadership, clear respectful communication, process coordination, trust, and milestone celebrations.

Foster teams in the performing stage to continuously self-audit and improve through ruthless self-examination, with leadership providing instructional programs and open communication.

Explore a sample team working agreement and how collaborative brainstorming shapes a participatory, visible document that guides team behavior during disagreements and fosters harmony.

Explore how self-organizing, self-managing agile teams operate without managers assigning work, control tasks and timelines, with servant leadership, retrospectives, and working agreements boosting morale and outcomes.

Boost team morale by setting goals, planning with individuals, and practicing active listening. Conduct regular retrospectives to capture feedback, build trust, and drive continuous improvement in performance and velocity.

Learn how co-location enhances agile teamwork through open workspace design, osmosis communication, and trust-building, while addressing remote and hybrid collaboration challenges for global teams.

Scrum masters protect the team from distractions using the Pomodoro technique—25-minute work blocks with breaks, maintain focus, email checks at specific times, and single-item work to improve agile efficiency.

Use brain mapping with the core team to craft a team vision that coordinates work, motivates members, and clarifies how tasks fit the project.

Explore how performance measurements reveal team and individual progress in Agile. Use burn down charts to estimate work, track remaining and ideal effort daily, and visualize sprint progress.

Understand how burndown charts compare planned and actual sprint progress using story points. Learn to spot deviations, end-of-sprint activity spikes, testing timing, and enable teams to inspect and adapt.

Create and interpret an iteration status chart to visualize progress across iterations, showing previous, current, and completed items. This boosts communication with leadership, stakeholders, and customers.

Boost team coherence and development for high performance in cross-functional teams through co-location and clear communication. Create team vision, apply performance measurements, and minimize distractions to bolster team morale.

Explore rolling wave planning and progressive elaboration in adaptive planning to publish, communicate deliverables to teams and leadership, and adapt cadence, inspect and adapt, for scope, schedule and cost estimates.

Describe rolling wave planning as a continual, wave-based approach where near-term work is detailed, mid-term plans are semi-detailed, and high-level work remains broad, driven by progressive elaboration.

Publish planning results to keep teams and leadership informed with information radiators in areas. Radiators display metrics at a glance, including tests, velocity, incidents, upcoming goals, and completed stories.

Identify and communicate deliverables as scope artifacts, distinguishing internal and external types with clear delivery dates, stakeholders, and expectations; use flexible methods—sketches, videos, prototypes—to convey what will be built.

Adapt cadence to agile work cycles by planning, doing, checking, and adjusting within sprints, aligning backlog with requirements to deliver value to customers.

Explore how inspect and adapt drives Agile teams at sprint ends, using root-cause analysis and backlog-driven improvements facilitated by the Scrum Master to sustain momentum.

Balance variables to resolve issues and tailor agile approaches across projects, products, and software development, including educational, government, and marketing contexts, from scrum to scaled agile.

Adjust team size to three to nine for a sweet spot, choose component or feature scrum teams, and vary location and scrum master model from full-time per team to part-time.

Explore how agile teams adjust variables, comparing product manager collaboration and delegation, and showing how sprint lengths and burn down and burn up charts flex to fit the organization.

Adjust for maintenance and operational demands by coordinating maintenance windows and aligning work across development, testing, and staging environments within team planning.

Explore how PMI-ACP exam topics on agile scope, schedule, and cost estimates differ from waterfall methods, using top-down, feature-based planning and T-shirt sizing for refinement. Refine estimates as development progresses.

Product managers combine preliminary scope estimates with refined, historical story points data to derive cost ranges, using a top-down approach that assigns cost per story point per iteration.

Continuously groom the backlog with the product owner and team, remove stale items, pre-populate upcoming sprints with user stories, and refine definitions of ready and done to maximize value.

Use data to calibrate agile planning and optimize team performance. Scrum masters and product owners collaborate to make objective, data-driven decisions that adapt to market and customer needs.

Chapter seven presents adaptive planning within Agile, detailing the inspect and adjust cycle, rolling wave planning, publishing planning results, and communicating the deliverables. It covers adapting cadence, inspecting and adapting as you progress, adjusting for variables, maintenance and operational demands, and refining the delivery while using data to calibrate the scope, schedule, and cost range estimates toward chapter eight on problem detection and resolution.

Explore domain six: problem detection and resolution by fostering the right team environment, mastering conflict resolution, and improving processes for detecting and mitigating risks while communicating risks effectively.

Fostering the right environment using an agile culture boosts engagement, reduces disengagement costs, and delivers real-time improvements and tangible return on investment.

Foster a collaborative work culture that fuels innovation and adaptability by empowering self-motivated, self-managing teams to collaborate, experiment, fail fast, inspect and adapt, and pursue organic, team-driven change.

Learn to differentiate between conflict and dispute, identify the five levels of team conflict, and guide a scrum master or project leader to resolve them.

Foster team collaboration and consensus across level-based improvement processes, guided by the scrum master to keep discussions constructive and resolve conflicts with shuttle diplomacy when needed.

Identify and assess risks throughout a project, analyze potential impacts on schedule, scope, and budget, and execute a response plan through mitigation, avoidance, or transfer.

Learn to apply an end-to-end risk management process within agile, iterative frameworks to plan, assess, monitor, and document risks, reducing future problems and making risk management everyone's responsibility.

Maintain a risk adjusted backlog with actions for negative risks (avoid, mitigate, transfer) and positive risks (exploit, enhance, share), and review the risk register with leadership for sprint planning.

Review chapter eight’s risk process, foster a positive environment for teams, and explore conflict resolution and improvement processes. Learn PMI risk management and communication steps to prepare for the exam.

Explore continuous improvement through periodic team effectiveness reviews, organizational retrospectives, and demonstrations that foster learning, value stream analysis, and systemic improvements.

Coordinate regular periodic reviews of team effectiveness to validate sprint goals, value recognition, and sustainable pace, using burn up/down charts and standard checks to maximize project efficiency.

Conduct organizational retrospectives after eight to twelve months to identify positive and negative practices, maintain a backlog of actions, and use start/stop/continue, Scrum checklists, and team assessments to drive improvement.

Demonstrations drive agile teams by validating work at sprint end, incorporating product owner input, guiding backlog prioritization, and feeding customer feedback into continuous improvement.

Foster a learning culture within agile projects by enabling self-development, peer learning, stakeholder collaboration, and ad-hoc training sessions, linking enterprise strategy to team practice and boosting morale and retention.

Apply value stream mapping to visualize processes, identify inefficiencies, and prioritize improvements that increase customer value while reducing cost and complexity.

Map the current value stream, define customer value, imagine the perfect process, identify waste, and assign initiatives and tasks to maximize value and drive improvement.

Advance systemic improvements by sharing retrospectives' learnings across the organization and embracing continuous delivery in a lean lifecycle to shorten ideation-to-deployment time and fail early.

Chapter nine reviews periodic team effectiveness, organizational retrospectives, impact demonstrations, and value stream analysis to encourage learning and deliver systemic improvements within Agile, completing ACP domains.