Reflections about the PMI-ACP Certification

Yesterday, I sustained the exam to attain the PMI-ACP (PMI Agile Certified Practitioner) certification and fortunately I obtained it.

Compared to the PMP (PMI Project Management Professional) exam, it’s obviously easier, because the scope of the agile “discipline” of project management is smaller that the traditional one.

Well, first of all you should start from the official PMI certification page: PMI® Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACPsm) in order to gather all the information regarding the certification, the exam and the requirements in terms of knowledge you should acquire.

You must answers to 120 questions (20 of them are not judged because they are experimental and treated as a survey).
When the exam starts, you have 3 hours to complete it (that is a long time, in my opinion).

I would start this post with some personal suggestions:

• make the exam simulation in order to practice with the buttons and the way you can review the questions marked
• even if you encounter questions that you are not sure about, choose the same an answer and mark it in order to review when finished. This because if you even run out of time, you will have 25% of probabilty to have choosen the right answer
• before you start the exam, drink a coffé or a glass of water, eat a snak (fruit is better!) and, why not, go to the rest room. These, in order to have all the three hours available without interruptions and energy enough to avoid the concentration goes down

The questions were mainly relating to : scrum, xp, lean.
SCRUM, played a primary role: most of the questions I encountered were about roles, meetings, information radiators and rules of SCRUM.
Some questions were about XP: the roles, the practices (TDD, refactoring, pair programming, etc).
Some other regarded lean: lean portfolio management, the value stream mapping technique, the lean principles.
Then, I found some questions about story points: what they are, how they are used and represented. Hence, the planning poker game was cited as well.

Some other questions regarded the velocity and how it is used.
Some questions were arranged as exercises where you were asked to calculate the number of iterations with a well defined velocity or again how many stories the team should commited to having a predefined average velocity (remember the done rule and the fact that you can consider a story actully done, only if it satisfies all the prerequisites).

What was stressed in more that one question, is the importance of self-organization and the team empowerment and the role of the agile project manager (SCRUM Master) to behave as a facilator, coach and servant leader.

I found some questions regarding the risk burndown chart and the risk audit practice, things cited into the book of Michele Sliger (see the book list below).
Finally, it was stressed a bit the importance of the release planning ceremony (even if, actually, in SCRUM this is not a mandatory ceremony), meeting used to develop the product and release visions and the product roadmap.

This is the list of books I suggest (some of them are suggested by the PMI for this certification):

• Managing Agile Projects, Sanjiv Augustine,  Prentice Hall PTR
• Official Scrum Guide, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland,  Scrum.org
• Agile Project Management with Scrum,  Ken Schwaber,  Microsoft Press
• Agile Estimating and Planning,  Mike Cohn, Prentice Hall
• Agile retrospective – making good teams great,  Esther Derby, Diana Larsen
• The Software Project Manager’s Bridge to Agility, Michele Sliger and Stacia Broderick, Addison-Wesley
• The Art of Agile Software Development, James Shore,  O’Reilly
• Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game 2nd Edition, Alistair Cockburn, Addison Wesley
• Coaching Agile Teams,  Lyssa Adkins,  Addison Wesley
• Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterpise Agility,  Alan Shalloway, James R. Trott, Guy Beaver,  Net Objective Lean Agile series

I found very interesting the suggestions came from Sally Elatta regarding her retrospective about the exam and some study tips.

Ooh, I was forgetting: it could not be missing a question about the agile manifesto (one of the values in my case)!

This was my experience with the PMI-ACP Agile certification and, what about yours?

PMI-ACP Certification Achieved

The journey is finished, the objective attained: the PMI-ACP certification is finally mine )

Within few days I’m going to issue a post containing the details of my preparation…stay tuned!

PMI-NIC Agile Project Management

• deliver value to the customer in a steady pace
• involving as much as possible the customer with agile
• adopting the communication style to and supplying project progress data the customer wants (adopting the “barely sufficient approach” Alistair Cockburn suggests)

Facilitating the process of learning and growth of an agile team

Every time I teach in a course, whatever the content, even if the organizer tried to arrange the classes in a balanced way in terms of experience level of the attendees, it happens that someone knows less than the others regarding the area I’m going to talk about.

In these cases, I try to keep aligned the class starting from the basic concepts, avoiding to be excessively detailed and trying not to annoy the experts. Then, when I switch to the advanced topics, I make a great use of metaphores: it helps to catch the gist using past experience, idioms or whatever could sustain the interest of the whole class.

It happens, though, that the experts patiently wait for some more details and once supplied, the novices start to shake their heads, looking at me somehow “lost in transactions”.

This happens because it is usual that, when we are called to learn something new, we should pass through three different stages:

1. Following
2. Detaching
3. Fluent

Alistair Cockburn explains this theory very well here. That theory, actually, is somehow inherited from the Shu-ha-ri martial art japanese concept, which describes the stages of learning to mastery.

ShuHaRi - Wikipedia

When we are learning something new, something not easy, we are completely dedicated to understand the topic, circumscribe it and finally derive a method that could help us facing that new knowledge.

Any additional information, alternative, tip or trick is not well accepted during this phase, most of the time is discarded as “waste“, because during this step we only want to learn the easiest and most effective approach to “survive”: other data is entropy.

At least for a period of time that can vary from one weak to 6/8 weeks (depending on the complexity, etc.), we are called to practice the new knowledge, inspecting and adapting our approach in order to verify what we learned. It’s during this phase that we feel the  necessity to find other ways to solve the problem, exploring new paths.

Mary Poppendieck - In theory there's no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.

This is the exact moment when we enter the second stage called detaching (or leaving).

We are no more satisfied of what we have learned so far, probably we found some flaws, we want alternatives, walkarounds, more detail regarding the problem and what causes it. That’s the moment to come back to books or teachers learning something new.

Again it’s a matter of time and dedication. Lot of water has to pass under the bridge, we just need to practice the new knowledge, like when we learn to swim. In that occasion we repeated the same movements many times, again, again and over again, letting that “knowledge” passes from the conscious to the unconscious mind, also called “muscle-memory“, that digests that knowledge and makes it available, automatically.

Papua New Guinea proverb: Knowledge is only a rumor until it’s in the muscle

Finally, the water passed under the bridge and we don’t strive anymore to use the knwoledge: it is part of us. It happens and that’s enough.

As it happens to trainers to have course’s attendees with different level of knowledge, it happens to team leaders or coaches, to have teams that comprise both juniors and seniors members.

In this case the XP practice of pair-programming help-us.

Pairing helps juniors when they are navigators as well as drivers.

As “navigators” they have the possibility to see, ask and verify new approaches, techniques, tools and as “dirvers” they can practice what they just learned, being corrected immediately in case of errors. Both situations take advantage of one of the most important values of agile discipline: the short-feedback-cycle.

And what if we don’t have aboard any senior team member? In this case we as Scrum Master, Agile Coach or technical leaders, are called to get our hands dirty, pairing with the juniors and bringing some new fresh air by teaching new things, concepts, approaches.

This could be the moment when we cross over the Tuckman’s theory.

Tuckman's Theory: Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing

1. Forming
2. Storming
3. Norming
4. Performing

During the first stage (forming), the team listen to what you’re saying trying to accomodate this new knowledge with the one they already have: they don’t want to argue, they only want to learn and understand how to apply new knowledge.

During the storming phase, instead, different ideas and perspectives grow, they don’t want to change or they fear changes: but most of the times it is only a matter of listen to their doubts, assuring about the goodness of the theory and finally practicing, a lot.

This for sure will happen the first time a team embraces SCRUM: the first iterations aren’t so easy and the team will try to force to change the rules of the game, trying to cut some practices or changing some behaviors.

In these case is very usefull to put in practice what Jeff Sutherland called the Shock Therapy that can be summarized as follows:

1. Train the team
2. Set iteration length to 1/2 weeks, in order to have a short feedback between what the team does and what are the results
3. Set Definition of Done
4. Large use of information radiators
5. Respect any SCRUM meeting
6. Do not change anything before three months

Furthermore, he used to say to the team the first time it entered the workplace, that it is like when a karateka enters in a new Dojo. Above the entrance there’s a poster saying

“Forget what you know about karate,
forget your way of doing that,
this is my dojo,
you all are asked to do it my way“

Agile Coach Camp Outcomes

The past week-end I attended the Agile Coach Camp un-conference, that took place in Umbria in a lovely venue called La Casella.

The main objective of that un-conference was to aggregate people interested in agile project management and coaching practices. As described in the event home-page:

Two days of highly collaborative, (mostly) self-organized event with Agile coach dojo and OpenSpace for everyone involved in coaching,training, mentoring and leading Agile Organizations, Teams and Individuals.
ScrumMasters, team leads, guerilla Change Agents, ProductOwners, managers, other roles are all welcome. Diversity makes us smarter!

What a fantastic experience it has been!

I’ve known special people: people whose only objective was to collaborate and share ideas, knowledge, experience and thoughts.

People who know that in these cases the real result of the sum of two ideas is more than the algebrical result.

People that consider more important the growth of the community that its.

Passionate people who love what is doing and ready to share its passion with you.

Did I already said that it has been a great experience?

Agile PMI Certification: News

Qualche news dopo la visione del webcast della presentazione del lancio della nuova certificazione e di qualche ricerca su internet.

Oggi ho assistito al Webcast di presentazione della nuova certificazione agile del PMI, che si era tenuto il 17/3 e al quale non avevo potuto paretecipare.

Sembrerebbe che il PMI stesse seguendo con interesse l’evoluzione delle discipline agili, da almeno due anni (marzo 2009) e che nel marzo 2010 abbia deciso di lavorare alla nuova certificazione professionale.

Durante la presentazione, sono state riassunte le informazioni base di cui ho già scritto in questi post (Il PMI e la nuova certificazione “agile” e Agile PM Certification Suggested Books). 

Nella presentazione sono citate le seguenti metodologie come appartenenti alle discipline agili: scrum , xp , kanban , fdd e dsdm.

L’interesse del PMI per la tematica, è risultato evidente soprattutto nel modo in cui è stato rimarcato il messaggio che il PMBOK non debba essere pensato come alla “vecchia metodologia” di conduzione dei progetti.

Esso, invece, rappresenterebbe la cassetta degli attrezzi a dispodizione del project manager:  il “cosa fare“; mentre le discipline agili il “come farlo“. Strumento (PMBOK) e processo di implementazione (Agile).

Papers

Curiosando qua e là nella rete, alla ricerca di qualche papers tra quelli segnalati, ho trovato qualcosa di interessante soprattutto su un paio di autori: Michelle Sliger e Mike Griffiths.

Ecco il risultato delle miei ricerche:

• Agile Project Management and the PMBOK® Guide by Michelle Sliger
  • 1^ Puntata http://tinyurl.com/ekb4p
  • 2^ Puntata http://tinyurl.com/k4n4n
  • 3^ Puntata http://tinyurl.com/f9uop
  • 4^ Puntata http://tinyurl.com/vvnjc
  • Presentazione http://140.99.29.241/images/uploads/PMBOKtoAgileMapping.pdf
• Selling Agile: How to get buy-in from your team, customers and managers by Michelle Sliger
  • http://140.99.29.241/images/uploads/WhitePaper_SellingAgile.pdf
• Development Projects by Mike Griffiths
  • http://leadinganswers.typepad.com/leading_answers/files/developments_in_agile_project_management_mike_griffiths.pdf

Ah, dimenticavo. Per chi volesse seguire il tema su Twitter ecco il tag di riferimento: #pmiagilecert.

Stay tuned!

Agile PM Certification Suggested Books

Ecco i primi libri e papers suggeriti dal PMI per chi guarda alla certificazione Agile PM (vedi anche post precedenti: post1 e post2).

Papers (acquistabili per circa 15 dollari dal marketplace di PMI.org):

• Agile Project Management and the PMBOK® Guide by Michelle Sliger
• Agile PMP®: Managing software projects in the face of uncertainty by Mike Cottmeyer
• Challenges in Implementing Agile Project Management by Jesse Fewell
• Looking for an Edge by Jesse Fewell
• Selling Agile: How to get buy-in from your team, customers and managers by Michelle Sliger
• Utilizing Agile Principles Alongside the PMBOK® Guide for Better Project Execution and Control in Software
• Development Projects by Mike Griffiths

Libri:

• Agile Project Management by Jim Highsmith
• Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme by Robert K. Wysocki
• Project Management the Agile Way by John C. Goodpasture, PMP
• The Software Project Manager’s Bridge to Agility by Michele Sliger and Stacia Broderick
• Running an Agile Software Development Project by Mike Holcombe
• Managing Agile Projects, First Edition by Kevin Aguanno, editor
• Agile Project Management: How to succeed in the face of changing project requirements by Gary Chin
• Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber

La lista sopra non è ancora quella ufficiale di riferimento per lo studio, ma essendo comunque fornita dal PMI credo non sarà molto diversa.

Io sono partito acquistando l’eBook dell’ultimo libro dell’elenco sopra (Agile Project Management with Scrum di Schwaber), perché consigliato anche da Simon Bennet, il trainer del corso Scrum a cui ho partecipato.

Buon libro. Approfondisce le tematiche Scrum con molti esempi sul campo e, cosa ancor più a valore aggiunto, cerca di tracciare legami tra le modalità di conduzione e rappresentazione di progetti standard con progetti agili (in questo caso Scrum appunto).

Per chi infine fosse interessato a seguire su Twitter la tematica, ecco il tag di riferimento: #PMIAgileCert

Nice morning!

Il PMI e la nuova certificazione “agile”

Qualche giorno fà ho ricevuto una email dal PMI, nella quale l’organizzazione avvertiva la comunità che è in procinto di lanciare una nuova e interessantissima certificazione.

Le principali motivazioni che hanno convinto il PMI a prendere la decisione, derivano dalle seguenti considerazioni:

• I prinicipi “agili” sono ormai già ampliamente applicati alla gestione dei progetti.
• Le aziende stanno di fatto già richiedendo ai pm, conoscenze agili per il rilascio veloce dei prodotti.

Viene da chiedersi se non se ne siano accorti un pò in ritardo: un’organizzazione di quel tipo non dovrebbe essere proattiva piuttosto che reattiva?

Beh, sia come sia. Questa rimane comunque una notizia molto interessante.

Premesso che personalmente considero come vero valore di una certificazione, certamente non la spilletta “certified” da attaccarsi alla giacca, quanto invece l’esperienza (studio e pratica) fatta per ottenerla, vediamo un pò più in dettaglio di cosa si tratta .

Nella mail raccontano che la questione è ancora in fase di organizzazione. In questi giorni, infatti, stanno ricercando un primo set di persone disponibili a formare il gruppo pilota che fungerà da “beta-tester” sull’intero processo di certificazione (interessati? Segnalatelo a AgilePilot@PMI.org).

Sempre nell’email è riportato un link  ad una pagina del sito, in cui sono spiegati alcuni importanti dettagli per l’ottenimento della certificazione, che cerco di riassumere brevemente qui di seguito:

• E’ necessario dimostrare di avere sulle spalle almeno 2000 ore negli ultimi 5 anni di “General Project Management Experience” (se siete già PMP certificati, questo requisito è già soddisfatto)
•  E’ necessario dimostrare di avere sulle spalle almeno 1500 ore dedicate negli ultimi 2 anni di “Agile Project Management Experience“
• E’ necessario totalizzare un minimo di 21 ore di formazione specifiche sulle discipline agili di pm

Una volta soddisfatti i requisiti sopra, ci sarà da sottomettere la solita lettera di candidatura con tutti i dettagli del caso.

All’accettazione della candidatura potremo procedere al pagamento (circa 400 dollari) e alla prenotazione dell’esame. Esame che conterà 120 domande da evadere in tre ore.

Sembra che il tutto sarà attivo a partire dal 4 trimestre di quest’anno, ma prendetelo con le pinze. Anche nome e sigla ufficiali della certificazione, verranno comunicati in quel periodo.

Bene, ma quale sarebbe il valore aggiunto di questa ennesima certificazione?

1. Imparare di più rispetto a: scrum, xp, crystal, dsdm, fdd.
2. Dimostrare competenza a chi ci assume/incarica.
3. Aumento della versatilità professionale all’uso di tecniche applicate al pm.

 Vi basta? A me, si

SCRUM & Large Projects

Come conciliare SCRUM e grossi progetti?

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