Agile Project Management Certification | Agile Training

[RuthKimberly]

Agile Project Management - Benefits to your Career

Introduction:

One of the key points that an IT professional faces when he transitions from an orthodox Waterfall model of development to the Agile way of development, is its pace. Faster the process but still it is the most efficient process of software development present in the current situation and has by far grown leaps and bounds in the IT industry.

As a practice, it would be better to have a certification in the area that you lead most of your professional life. The section below takes a deeper look into what kinds of certification options are available for an individual to take up to mold his career to a better shape.

Certification Options

Let us now look at each of the available options and also look at the brighter side of your career when an individual completes one amongst these certifications or all of these certifications in specific. In all of these certifications, it is very important to keep ourselves abreast with the latest happenings throughout the year to keep your professional designations relevant and also up to date at the same time.

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Let us dig deeper without any further delay.

1. The Scrum Master role (CSM, abbreviated as Certified Scrum Master): This certification is certified / provided by the Scrum Alliance group. General observation over the years now is that a Scrum Master and a Project Manager are similar roles with similar powers within the team and has become tradition both roles should be played by a single person. As of this article writing, I am a Scrum Master and not a Project Manager by role within my team and I feel is the best way to segregate these roles.

A CSM certification requires the following from an individual:

• An individual familiar with the Scrum methodologies. We can access the Scrum documentation from the Scrum Alliance website without any registrations to go through how Scrum transforms the world of software development.
• 2 days in-person training from a Scrum Alliance authorized trainer. The two days of training is followed by taking up of an online exam to qualify for the CSM certification, a passing score of 24 and above is required out of 35 questions that are presented to us.

That was easy, wasn’t it? Now let us see the next available certification for an IT individual / professional to take up.

2. The Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP): This certification is certified / provided by the PMI (Project Management Institute) group.

A PMI-ACP certification requires the following from an individual who tends to show interest in taking up this certification:

• 1500 hours and more working within agile teams using agile methodologies
• 2000 hours and more working on project teams
• At least 21 hours of study on Agile principles

3. The Certified Agile Project Manager (Cert.APM): This certification is certified / provided by the PMAC (Project Management Association of Canada).

An APM certification requires the following from an individual who tends to show interest in taking up this certification:

• It is expected that the individual completes the PMAC-accredited agile project management course a year earlier applying for this certification.
• Should hold a very well recognized project management credentials or a well-documented one year experience of project / portfolio / program management experience which will then be reviewed and certified by the PMAC operational committee.

Benefits with these certifications:

Most of the benefits that you reap out of these certifications is the right way or path to take as per the scenarios that you face on a day to day basis. These certifications are rightfully pointed towards situations that agile enthusiasts encounter on a day to day basis in their regular day’s work. Though all the three certifications are targeted to different purposes, different levels of experiences and different sets of people – nonetheless, it talks all about the Agile and Scrum methodologies. As a reason of which, you reap the same benefits out of any of the certifications that you opt.

Particularly, the APM certification will give you a double edged reference of the projects that you manage both from the Project Management level and also from the Agile Scrum way. Considering the point above, we have jotted down the benefits that a project manager can reap once he is APM certified.

• Better visibility and better salary
• Better credibility, keeping up to the market trend
• Gives you a clear understanding about Project management in the Agile world as against the traditional / orthodox methodologies
• Enables you to apply tried and tested methods via the Agile Project Management way
• Enables you to equip yourself with the core principles and processes that are required for successfully delivering agile projects
• Enables you to apply DSDM approaches to your projects for effective and efficient solutions
• Let’s you tailor your own way of approaching the practical problem of Project Management the agile way
• Helps you gain confidence in delivering higher quality products with the least possible risks, milestone over milestone – to gain confidence in your subsequent releases.
• Be the informed member, the coach of all the possible Agile and DSDM processes for others disposal
• It is a definite addition to your resume, adds a remarkable value on your profile

Nevertheless, you may gain a year’s free membership to Agile business consortiums in your city.  

Conclusion:

This article was aimed to bring awareness into the interested IT professionals to take up certifications of their choice and also has provided best of the knowledge available to take advantage from. To summarize, the APM certification is very much similar to the CSM certification. The ACP differs from both of the above with just one more section added to it, the “ethics” section. Also there are several questions on the other agile methods of practice such as DSDM, FDD, XP, Lean & Scrum etc