PMI-ACP certificate

There is an interesting certificate from the Project Management Institute called PMI-ACP which stands for PMI Agile Certified Professional.

After the PMP certificate which is well known, but dealing with the Waterfall approach, this new certificate is oriented towards now emerging Agile approach of managing projects. It is no wonder that it is currently the most taken exam on PMI.

Prerequisities are:

• 2,000 hours of general project experience working on teams. A current PMP® or PgMP® will satisfy this requirement but is not required to apply for the PMI-ACP.

• 1,500 hours working on agile project teams or with agile methodologies. This requirement is in addition to the 2,000 hours of general project experience.

• 21 contact hours of training in agile practices.

What I find interesting is a list of books that are suggested as reading, to prepare for this certificate and I believe it is a good list for everyone who is working as an Agile Project Manager. List can be found here: http://www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/public/pdf/certifications/agile-gain-insights.pdf

There is also an examination content outline, which can serve great as a guideline of the topics one should focus on as an Agile Project Manager. You can find those topics here: http://www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/public/pdf/certifications/agile-certified-exam-outline.pdf

Taken from there (but do visit the link for even more in depth details):

• Agile Principles and Mindset
  Explore, embrace, and apply agile principles and mindset within the context of the project team and organization. 
• Value-Driven Delivery
  Deliver valuable results by producing high-value increments for review, early and often, based on stakeholder priorities. Have the stakeholders provide feedback on these increments, and use this feedback to prioritize and improve future increments. 
• Stakeholder EngagementEngage current and future interested parties by building a trusting environment that aligns their needs and expectations and balances their requests with an understanding of the cost/effort involved. Promote participation and collaboration throughout the project life cycle and provide the tools for effective and informed decision making.
• Team Performance
  Create an environment of trust, learning, collaboration, and conflict resolution that promotes team self-organization, enhances relationships among team members, and cultivates a culture of high performance. 
• Adaptive Planning
  Produce and maintain an evolving plan, from initiation to closure, based on goals, values, risks, constraints, stakeholder feedback, and review findings. 
• Problem Detection and Resolution
  Continuously identify problems, impediments, and risks; prioritize and resolve in a timely manner; monitor and communicate the problem resolution status; and implement process improvements to prevent them from occurring again. 
• Continuous Improvement (Product, Process, People)Continuously improve the quality, effectiveness, and value of the product, the process, and the team. 

Scrum certification

There are 2 kinds of certificates existing for Scrum. One is from Scrum Alliance and one is from Scrum.org

CSM Certified Scrum Mater certificate from Scrum Alliance: https://www.scrumalliance.org/certifications/practitioners/certified-scrummaster-csm is not so good as it allows basically everyone to pass it. This organisation REQUIRES you to take a 2 day course and it costs around 1200$, but it really depends on where you are taking it. Up to 2012 everyone who was taking the course was getting a certificate, regardless of the test score. Nowadays it is still an easier option to pass.

PSM I Professional Scrum Master certificate from Scrum.org: organisation founded by Ken Schwaber. It takes a lot less money to take an exam than the above mentioned one, but that is just the exam fee (course is not required). From what I have heard, this one is also harder to get.

How should you prepare for the exam then? Basically you should study the Scrum Manual, a 16 page document and then test your knowledge with an Open Assesment https://www.scrum.org/Assessments/Open-Assessments and do until you can score 100% more times in a row. Next to this it is not bad to read some basic book about Scrum like Succeeding with Agile or some similar resource I will write about. It is of course good, not sure if necessary to practice Scrum for some time before taking an exam, but my personal opinion would be that you can pass the first level exam also without having an active practice.

Here are good articles from the scrum.org founder about why he has started the second organisation. He will just write what I have written above in more details.

How do I build an Agile organisation PART1 PART2 PART3

Enjoy on your path of becoming a certified Scrum Master!

SCRUM Introduction

SCRUM

On this link you can find the latest SCRUM Guide from 2016. I will try to give here a short and simple description of what SCRUM is. SCRUM is simply put a framework for developing complex projects. It is important to mention that it was created by developers. It's aim is to advance productivity and give better products in the end.

SCRUM TEAM
SCRUM recognizes 3 types of roles:
Product Owner is a person who is in charge of specification (product backlog items) and can represent a committee of stakeholders.
Scrum Master is a person who takes care that SCRUM is being used and is there to help the Product Owner and the Development Team.
Development Team are the people actively working on implementing the features from the product backlog items. Officially there are no different roles being recognized in the Development Team. Development Team as a whole is supposed to know everything and is able to make any part of the functionality (which is rare in reality) and together they are supposed to have enough know how to be able to implement the entire product. By SCRUM the Development Team should be between 3 and 9 people.

SCRUM ARTIFACTS
Scrum artifacts are the things provided in the SCRUM for everyone to understand the process and status of the product that is being developed.
Product Backlog Item can be a User Story, Task, Subtask, Incident, Bug etc...
Product Backlog is basically a list of of functionalities that need to be developed so that product can be finished or in other words product specification. It consists of well explained items by Product Owner, that can be understood and further refined and divided by the Development Team into the smaller units of work.
Sprint Backlog (a bit afterwards will be explained what a Sprint is) is a list of product backlog items that the Development Team has chosen to do in a certain time frame, usually between 1 and 4 weeks.
Burndown Chart is a graphical presentation of the progress of the tasks in a Sprint. We can see on it how much work should (mathematically calculated) ideally be done in every point of time of the Sprint.
Increment is the final list of fully working and accepted by the Product Owner functionalities (tasks) that are being developed in the Sprint.

SCRUM EVENTS
If Scrum Artifacts were the things, Scrum Events are the processes that are continually repeated.
Scrum Planning is a process in which we are planning which product backlog items are going to be included in the coming Sprint Backlog. Amount of items that will be inserted depends on the experience from the previous Sprints and how much work was actually done by the end. No item from the Product Backlog is allowed to enter into the Sprint Backlog until all the necessary criteria have been met, that are defined by the Development Team. It should take up to 8 hours for a 4 week Sprints and less for shorter ones.
Daily (Standup Meeting) Scrum is as it name says meeting that is being conducted on a daily basis by a Development Team, whose purpose is to clarify 3 things mainly. What has each developer done on a previous day, what are his plans for the current day and if there are any impediments that are blocking any member of the team from further progressing with their work.
Sprint Review is a demo that is being shown to the Product Owner of the Increment. It is being done at the end of the Sprint.
Sprint Retrospective is a process in which Development Team is discussing together with a Scrum Master what went good, what went wrong and how it can be improved in the following Sprint.

There are other two things that I find very important in the SCRUM framework. Definition of Ready and Definition of Done.
Definition of Ready: During the Scrum Planning when we are choosing which Product Backlog Items to put into Sprint Backlog we have to make sure that the Development Team has all the necessary information they need in order to implement the Backlog Item. SCRUM Team makes a deal about which all things need to be provided by the Product Owner so that the Product Backlog Item can be inserted into the Sprint Backlog. Definition of Ready can be updated during time when Sprint Retrospectives are done.
Definition of Done is a list of conditions that need to be fulfilled in order that Product Owner can accept some finished part of Increment (Sprint Backlog Item implementation).

I have tried to explain SCRUM in short and simply written text... There is much more to it and as they say SCRUM is easy to learn but difficult to master!

KANBAN Introduction

KANBAN

Kanban is another concept of managing software development. It is gaining more and more popularity nowadays. Kanban means a signboard in Japanese. Kanban is done visually using a board where one can follow the progress of development through the different phases of the project. It is said that human brain can intuit visual information 60,000 times faster than text.

Kanban allows you to have only limited amount of Items in a single phase of the Development (for example in In Progress or in Testing) and therefore it prevents the team from doing all at once. When a certain phase is full of Items also the previous phase gets blocked, because it can not push any item into the next (filled) phase of development. So the team has to focus on the bottleneck where the work is stuck first before doing anything else.

Kanaban allows the developers to take tasks to work at any time unlike Scrum where all the Product Backlog Items are being pushed into the Sprint Backlog during the Sprint Planning. In this situation the manager has less administrative work to do with planning and organizing developers times.

Start

Hi, my name is Vladimir and I am an IT Project Manager (Delivery manager is the role name in the company) in Levi9 www.levi9.com

I have 7 years of experience as a software developer and now I have started working in this new role about which I will be writing here.

Here I would like to write about project management topics, reviews of books and interesting situations from work.

Agile development is the most popular way of developing software nowadays and we are witnesses that more and more companies are switching to it. It is characterized by small and iterative development cycles.

Let's start by introducing you to the Manifesto of Agile Software Development and it's principles.

One of the currently most used agile frameworks are SCRUM and Kanban. There are stories that they have became obsolete and there are new ones being developed constantly. There is also one other very interesting framework called DSDM which can nicely be combined with others. For the time being I will focus on these two. Every approach has pros and cons and it is important to learn each in depth in order to know when to use which and when to replace them with a different one.