by Richard Little, PMP
As an experienced PMP who is planning to seek the PMI-ACP certification, I recently took the ASPE Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)℠ Workshop and was extremely pleased with its overall structure and content. In fact, I was so pleased with this workshop, which was also my first ASPE course, that I decided to post this blog to share my thoughts and reactions regarding it, including why I would encourage my fellow PMPs to earn their PMI-ACP certification and consider ASPE for their preferred training partner.
If you’re not familiar with this new certification, PMI recently created it to recognize PMPs that have demonstrated their working knowledge of the major principles, practices, and methodologies of agile project management. In fact, according to www.PMI.org, a PMP in good standing must have at least 1,500 hours working on agile project teams or with agile methodologies, in addition to the overall hours of general project management experience, to qualify for this certification. Also, a PMP must also have had 21 contact hours of training, which is satisfied by taking this class, which earns you exactly 21 PDUs.
As a PMP myself, I established and managed an IT Project Office for a large IT organization that was increasingly moving towards adopting agile development to speed up the application development process and to handle time-sensitive, legislatively-mandated changes. Based on the feedback from other participants during this class, many other organizations have reached the same conclusion regarding agile development and have adopted agile project management either to handle regulatory changes with short lead times or just to improve the company’s overall speed in bringing new features to market.
In fact, one organization’s team in attendance included experienced as well as beginning PMs in what I considered to be a great team-building exercise, since the experienced PMs were going to immediately pursue their PMI-ACP while the beginning agile practitioners learned the core principles behind ACP certification. While not yet qualified to sit for their PMI-ACP certification, the new PMs could work on applying it with the confidence that they had been exposed to all of the recommended tools and techniques in using agile project management. For organizations already using agile project management, I thought this ASPE workshop served as a great refresher course as well as a reminder of recommended best practices.
Finally, as an experienced PMO administrator, I’m glad the PMI has established this certification, since it will help me to ascertain when future PMs have a demonstrated knowledge of agile plus significant real-life experience in using this methodology. The certification also allows me to recognize existing staff with this specialized expertise.
