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ACP
The PMI‑Agile Certified Practitioner course teaches professionals how to apply agile principles, value‑driven delivery, stakeholder engagement, team performance, and adaptive planning in real‑world projects, ensuring strategic, practical competence.
180
Minutes
120
Questions
$435
Exam Cost
Who Should Take This
Project managers, Scrum Masters, product owners, and senior team leads who have at least three years of hands‑on agile experience should enroll. They seek to validate their ability to drive value, manage stakeholder expectations, and lead high‑performing teams across multiple agile frameworks, advancing their career credibility and opening senior‑level opportunities.
What's Covered
1
Domain 1: Agile Principles and Mindset
2
Domain 2: Value-Driven Delivery
3
Domain 3: Stakeholder Engagement
4
Domain 4: Team Performance
5
Domain 5: Adaptive Planning
6
Domain 6: Problem Detection and Resolution
7
Domain 7: Continuous Improvement
What's Included in AccelaStudy® AI
Adaptive Knowledge Graph
Practice Questions
Lesson Modules
Console Simulator Labs
Exam Tips & Strategy
20 Activity Formats
Course Outline
69 learning goals
1
Domain 1: Agile Principles and Mindset
3 topics
Agile values and principles foundation
- Apply the four values of the Agile Manifesto to evaluate project decisions and determine when to prioritize individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change.
- Apply the twelve principles behind the Agile Manifesto to guide team behaviors including early and continuous delivery, welcoming changing requirements, and sustainable development pace.
- Evaluate organizational readiness for agile adoption by assessing culture, structure, leadership support, and existing processes against agile mindset prerequisites.
Agile frameworks and methodology selection
- Differentiate between Scrum, Kanban, XP, Lean, and Crystal frameworks by comparing their ceremonies, roles, artifacts, and applicability to different project contexts and team sizes.
- Recommend the most suitable agile framework or hybrid approach by evaluating project characteristics including requirements volatility, team distribution, regulatory constraints, and stakeholder availability.
- Apply the Cynefin framework to categorize work complexity as simple, complicated, complex, or chaotic and determine the appropriate agile response strategy for each domain.
Agile scaling and enterprise adoption
- Apply SAFe program increment planning practices including PI objectives, capacity allocation, feature prioritization, and cross-team dependency identification for large-scale agile delivery.
- Recommend a scaling approach from SAFe, LeSS, Nexus, and Scrum@Scale by evaluating organizational size, product complexity, and coordination requirements.
- Assess the impact of agile transformation on organizational structure, governance, and culture to identify adoption barriers and develop mitigation strategies for enterprise agile rollout.
2
Domain 2: Value-Driven Delivery
3 topics
Product backlog management and prioritization
- Create well-formed user stories using the INVEST criteria with clear acceptance criteria, story points, and business value estimates to populate and maintain a prioritized product backlog.
- Apply prioritization techniques including MoSCoW, Weighted Shortest Job First, Kano model analysis, and cost of delay to order backlog items by value delivery potential.
- Evaluate backlog health by analyzing story readiness, backlog depth, refinement throughput, and value distribution to determine whether the backlog supports sustainable delivery.
- Execute story mapping workshops to decompose epics into user stories, identify release slices, and establish a shared understanding of product scope and delivery sequence across the team.
Incremental delivery and value measurement
- Implement incremental delivery practices including minimum viable product definition, feature toggles, and continuous deployment to deliver value to users early and frequently.
- Evaluate delivered value using customer satisfaction metrics, net promoter scores, usage analytics, and business outcome measurements to validate that increments meet stakeholder expectations.
- Apply earned value management adapted for agile including agile EVM metrics, story point-based progress tracking, and burn rate analysis to forecast project completion and budget performance.
Quality practices and definition of done
- Establish a definition of done that includes coding standards, testing requirements, documentation completeness, review approvals, and deployment readiness criteria agreed upon by the team.
- Apply test-driven development, behavior-driven development, and acceptance test-driven development practices to embed quality verification into the development workflow.
- Assess technical debt levels by analyzing code complexity, test coverage, defect density, and refactoring backlogs to determine their impact on sustainable delivery velocity.
- Design a continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline strategy that automates build, test, and deployment stages to reduce cycle time and increase delivery confidence.
3
Domain 3: Stakeholder Engagement
3 topics
Product owner and stakeholder collaboration
- Apply product owner engagement practices including backlog grooming collaboration, sprint review facilitation, and stakeholder demo sessions to maintain alignment between delivery and business expectations.
- Evaluate stakeholder engagement effectiveness by measuring feedback loop cycle times, requirement clarity scores, and decision turnaround rates to identify collaboration bottlenecks.
- Recommend stakeholder engagement improvements including communication frequency adjustments, visual management tools, and feedback mechanism redesign to strengthen agile delivery partnerships.
Customer involvement and feedback
- Implement customer feedback mechanisms including sprint reviews, user acceptance testing, A/B testing, and usability studies to continuously validate delivered increments against customer needs.
- Analyze customer feedback patterns to identify unmet needs, feature gaps, and satisfaction trends that inform product backlog reprioritization and roadmap adjustments.
- Design a product discovery process that combines design thinking, lean startup experimentation, and customer journey mapping to validate hypotheses before committing to full development.
Agile contracting and vendor management
- Apply agile contracting approaches including time-and-materials, target cost, and graduated fixed-price models that accommodate scope evolution while maintaining budget accountability.
- Evaluate vendor agile capability by assessing team composition, delivery track record, retrospective practices, and cultural fit to determine partnership suitability for agile delivery.
4
Domain 4: Team Performance
4 topics
Self-organizing team formation and dynamics
- Apply self-organizing team principles by establishing team norms, working agreements, and decision-making protocols that empower team members to own their delivery process.
- Evaluate team dynamics using Tuckman's stages of group development to identify forming, storming, norming, and performing behaviors and apply appropriate interventions at each stage.
- Configure cross-functional team composition including generalizing specialists, T-shaped skills, and swarming practices to maximize delivery throughput and minimize handoff delays.
Servant leadership and agile coaching
- Apply servant leadership behaviors including active listening, empathy, awareness, stewardship, and commitment to team growth to create a psychologically safe team environment.
- Execute Scrum Master facilitation responsibilities including sprint planning, daily standup, sprint review, and retrospective ceremonies using time-boxed facilitation techniques.
- Assess coaching effectiveness by evaluating team autonomy growth, impediment resolution patterns, and team satisfaction trends to refine coaching approach and intervention timing.
- Design an agile coaching program that develops internal coaching capability through mentoring, communities of practice, and skills development pathways for team leaders and Scrum Masters.
Team performance measurement and motivation
- Implement team velocity tracking using story point completion rates, sprint burndown charts, and velocity trend analysis to establish predictable delivery cadence.
- Analyze team performance patterns including velocity stability, escaped defect rates, cycle time distributions, and flow efficiency to identify systemic productivity constraints.
- Apply intrinsic motivation frameworks including autonomy, mastery, and purpose to design team incentive structures and recognition practices that sustain high performance in agile teams.
Distributed and remote agile teams
- Configure distributed team collaboration practices including virtual ceremony facilitation, asynchronous communication protocols, and visual management board tools for remote agile delivery.
- Evaluate distributed team effectiveness by assessing communication latency, timezone overlap utilization, and collaboration friction to recommend structural or process improvements.
5
Domain 5: Adaptive Planning
4 topics
Agile estimation techniques
- Apply relative estimation techniques including planning poker, affinity estimation, T-shirt sizing, and story point calibration to establish consistent sizing conventions across the team.
- Evaluate estimation accuracy by comparing estimated versus actual effort using velocity data, estimate variance tracking, and cone of uncertainty analysis to improve forecasting reliability.
- Apply wideband Delphi and three-point estimation to produce probabilistic forecasts for large epics and features where relative sizing provides insufficient precision.
Sprint and iteration planning
- Execute sprint planning by establishing sprint goals, selecting backlog items based on team capacity and velocity, and decomposing stories into tasks with clear acceptance criteria.
- Assess sprint scope viability by analyzing team capacity, historical velocity, dependency readiness, and risk factors to determine achievable sprint commitments.
- Implement Kanban flow-based planning using work-in-progress limits, pull-based scheduling, and service level expectations as an alternative to iteration-based sprint planning.
Release planning and roadmapping
- Create an agile release plan using velocity-based forecasting, release burnup charts, and scope-schedule tradeoff analysis to communicate delivery timelines to stakeholders.
- Develop an adaptive product roadmap that communicates strategic themes, near-term commitments, and longer-term possibilities while explicitly acknowledging uncertainty horizons.
- Analyze release plan risks including scope creep indicators, dependency delays, and resource constraints to adjust release scope, timing, or team allocation proactively.
Agile metrics and flow management
- Implement cumulative flow diagrams and cycle time tracking to visualize work-in-progress, identify bottlenecks, and measure flow efficiency across the delivery pipeline.
- Analyze Little's Law relationships between work-in-progress, throughput, and cycle time to determine optimal WIP limits and predict delivery dates using probabilistic forecasting.
- Design an agile metrics framework that balances outcome metrics, process metrics, and team health indicators to provide multi-dimensional delivery performance visibility without encouraging gaming.
6
Domain 6: Problem Detection and Resolution
3 topics
Impediment identification and removal
- Implement impediment tracking processes including impediment boards, escalation workflows, and resolution time tracking to systematically identify and remove team delivery blockers.
- Analyze impediment patterns using root cause analysis, fishbone diagrams, and five-whys technique to distinguish symptoms from systemic issues affecting team delivery.
- Recommend organizational impediment resolution strategies for systemic blockers including cross-team dependencies, governance bottlenecks, and infrastructure limitations.
Risk management in agile contexts
- Apply agile risk management practices including risk-adjusted backlogs, spike stories for technical uncertainty, and iterative risk reduction through early delivery of high-risk features.
- Evaluate risk exposure trends across sprints by tracking risk burndown, risk velocity, and emerging risk indicators to determine whether iterative delivery is effectively reducing uncertainty.
- Design risk response strategies for agile projects including architectural spikes, proof of concept iterations, and fallback story alternatives to address technical and business uncertainties.
Conflict resolution and decision-making
- Apply conflict resolution techniques including collaborating, compromising, accommodating, and confronting approaches appropriate to the conflict type and team development stage.
- Evaluate decision-making approaches including consensus, consent-based, delegation, and autocratic methods to select the technique that balances speed and team buy-in for the situation.
7
Domain 7: Continuous Improvement
3 topics
Retrospectives and process improvement
- Execute sprint retrospectives using varied formats including starfish, sailboat, timeline, and four L's techniques to maintain engagement and surface diverse improvement perspectives.
- Analyze retrospective action item completion rates, improvement trend data, and recurring themes to evaluate whether the team's continuous improvement process is producing measurable outcomes.
- Formulate a systematic continuous improvement strategy using Lean kaizen principles, PDCA cycles, and improvement backlogs to institutionalize learning and adaptation beyond individual retrospectives.
Lean waste elimination and process optimization
- Apply Lean waste identification using the seven wastes framework to detect partially done work, extra features, task switching, waiting, handoffs, defects, and unnecessary motion in the delivery process.
- Evaluate process efficiency using value stream mapping to quantify value-add versus non-value-add time, identify handoff delays, and calculate process efficiency ratios.
- Optimize delivery pipeline flow by applying theory of constraints, bottleneck analysis, and batch size reduction to increase throughput and reduce end-to-end delivery cycle time.
Knowledge sharing and communities of practice
- Establish communities of practice and guilds that facilitate cross-team knowledge sharing, technical standards alignment, and collective problem solving across agile delivery teams.
- Determine the effectiveness of knowledge sharing mechanisms by measuring practice adoption rates, innovation contributions, and skill development outcomes across participating teams.
- Plan an organizational learning system that integrates retrospective insights, community of practice outputs, and external agile thought leadership into a continuously evolving practice framework.
Scope
Included Topics
- All domains in the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) examination content outline: Agile Principles and Mindset, Value-Driven Delivery, Stakeholder Engagement, Team Performance, Adaptive Planning, Problem Detection and Resolution, and Continuous Improvement.
- Core agile frameworks and methodologies including Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP), Lean Software Development, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Crystal, Feature-Driven Development (FDD), and Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM).
- Agile practices and techniques including user story writing, story mapping, velocity tracking, burndown and burnup charts, cumulative flow diagrams, work-in-progress limits, retrospectives, daily standups, sprint planning, backlog refinement, release planning, and continuous integration.
- Agile leadership and team dynamics including servant leadership, self-organizing teams, cross-functional collaboration, conflict resolution, team empowerment, coaching and mentoring, facilitation techniques, and collocated and distributed team management.
- Value delivery practices including minimum viable product definition, incremental delivery, acceptance criteria, definition of done, product backlog prioritization techniques (MoSCoW, WSJF, Kano model), and earned value in agile contexts.
Not Covered
- Deep predictive project management techniques including detailed Gantt chart construction, critical path method scheduling, and earned value management formulas covered primarily by PMP certification.
- Enterprise portfolio management and strategic alignment practices covered by PfMP certification.
- Specific tool configurations for agile platforms such as Jira, Azure DevOps, or Rally.
- Software engineering implementation details including code syntax, programming language specifics, and infrastructure configuration.
- Industry-specific compliance frameworks unless directly relevant to agile governance principles.
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