Passing PMI’s ACP exam in the first attempt – The Agile way
Passing PMI’s ACP exam in the first attempt is a breeze –
well almost – ok, let’s be more realistic - with a few pre-conditions that is J. As a pre-requisite
for taking the exam, when I first took the 21 hours mandatory study course,
little did I realize that there would be so much more for me to learn about Agile. Though I had gone through the Agile Manifesto earlier, the four
simple looking values, had never meant much. I had been through a lot of
reading on Agile specific terms / tidbits / presentations etc. for a long time now. My first exposure to real agile
reading was the kindle edition of ‘Agile Project Management for beginners' by Brian
Mathis. This is a very well written small book which gave a bird’s eye view yet
a good overview of Agile. The 21 hours course saw a few recommendations of
books coming in, all suggested by the PMI.
PMI suggests a dozen books, but my personal suggestion to
anyone starting on Agile Certification would be the ‘PMI-ACP Exam Prep’ by Mike
Griffiths. This book has been ordered well based on ‘PMI Agile Certification
Content Outline’ - a concise view on what the PMI would test you on. This is available in the PMI website. So this rests your apprehensions on what you
need to go through and understand – but wait… it is like, you are told that of
all the oceans, you would be asked only about the Pacific. But how deep would
be the questioning? You can bet a million dollars on that.. J. This is very important to understand because
you do not have a single bible like the ‘PMBoK’ which you can fall back on for anything
and everything of PMP exam. As the name suggests, the document is an outline and is just that. Whatever your guess is, it is bound to be wrong with respect to the depth
of awareness expected of you in clearing the exam, from the outline document.
The outline document was Greek and Latin, till I started off
with Griffiths. Fortunately Griffiths gives a good overview of the outline document
in addition to how to read his own book. I found the suggestions simply superb
and I followed it to the tee, most particularly, the test taking part.
After completing Griffiths, I took up Andy Crowe’s ‘The
PMI-ACP exam – How to pass on your first try’.
After all, that was my goal too. The contents looked very simplistic but
attempting the two sets of questions at the end of the book told me, I needed
to know more of Agile..
I also attempted Mike Cohn’s ‘Agile Estimating and Planning’
which is a very very good book. But I also found that the orientation was more
towards clearing the fundamental concepts and not on the exams, which threw me
off that book. Let me admit post haste,
under no stretch of imagination am I saying that the fundamentals are not
needed. From the exam point of view for ex., knowing that story points are needed to
calculate the volume of work is sufficient than knowing how the story point
technique evolved.
After completing Crowe, here I was, a poor soul, wanting to
obtain one more certification but more confused than ever in all my life. So what
was the reason for my confusion? It is simply this…. There are so many Greats
who have participated in creating the Agile Manifesto and each of them have
come up with their own methodology – each endorsing the other’s works in parts
and also deviating from them significantly on other areas. And thus, a new
methodology is born which is also part of PMI’s exam syllabus.
FORTUNATELY, PMI
to a large extent would test the brave-hearts who have paid the fees and gone
to the examination hall gallantly, on SCRUM & XP to a very large extent and
on the other methodologies like Crystal / DSDM / Lean etc. minimally. However, you may
ignore any of these less used or yet-to-become-popular-methodologies at your
own peril.
God, the Saviour, then as miraculously showed a small
glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, in the form of sample ACP questions
from the PMI site. This book, ‘PMI-ACP
Exam Prep: Questions, Answers & Explanations’ by Tim
Bagnall and Christopher Scordo (http://pmi.books24x7.com/toc.aspx?bkid=54338
) is available for PMI members. Based on the latest PMI-ACP exam outline, this
detailed and straightforward book provides practice tests that are designed to
help students adjust to the pace, subject matter, and difficulty of the real
PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) exam. The questions were
framed from most of the 12 books recommended by PMI. The most beautiful part
was, the answers had reasoning for why a certain answer was right and why the
others were wrong and also the source of the book that contained the relevant
answer. This is very important because
then and only then you will know, how to decipher the question and given the
context, zero-in on what could be the best answer. This also meant that I need
not go through all the recommended books individually. On attempting each
question set one after the other, I found my confidence and the scores steadily
raising which I needed very very very badly.
MSAcademy (www.msacademy.in),
the place from where I completed the 21 hour Agile coaching, had provided a few
hundred sample questions that I attempted
This is all that worked for me in achieving the PMI-ACP
credential.
The Modus Operandi
Timeboxing
Immediately after taking the mandatory 21 hours session, I
had visited the PMI site and filled in the on-line application form. It is free
up to this part. It takes close to 10 days for verification of credentials before
the clearance is given for you to pay the fees and choose the exam date / venue.
Once, my application was through, I gave myself a clear one month time
(Timeboxing) and chose the exam date.
The reasoning
If I set a date for myself, I can time my other activities
and focus better on exam taking. The high fees was one big motivator (can’t
afford to lose out J).
If you don’t set a date for yourself, you would find your exam
date getting postponed as per parkinson’s law. In this case, you would never take
the exam, since there is no pressure on you to deliver and you always find
something that is more higher up on your priority list, that you have to tackle
immediately. Also, the high fees acts as a dampener (Why invest in a hurry and
fail?) J.
Now that you have committed the money, every small waste of
time will loom large upon you with extra doses of guilt pangs and as a side
effect, you will find yourself devoting more time for studies J.
The team dynamics conundrum
I found the Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing stages
of team dynamics working well with respect to understanding the ACP exam syllabus. The relationship with team dynamics just ends here.
The forming stage:
In the beginning, you had some knowledge of Agile (Good, bad
& ugly) which you thought was all that there is to Agile (At least, I thought so J). Then came along the
21 hour session that feeds you on with more knowledge and some aspects contradicting
the ones you already have known and been practicing as Agile. J. Enter the Storming
stage.
The Storming Stage.
You are disgusted at how you could be practicing Agile
wrongly (We used to even market the wrong practices as Hybrid Agile J). Your whole system
revolts in trying to understand whatever is right. There is an internal fight
between what is actually claimed by Agile and what you have been practicing. There
is anger, Self-doubt, resentment, depression and all that worthless stuff that
strikes you when you are down. When you experience this phase more frequently, sufficiently for a few weeks and at many levels, you strangely find an order emerging where your acceptance
spectrum becomes more accommodating J.
Enter the norming stage.
The Norming stage
Now you are able to appreciate when a certain logic works and
when something else works and are also intuitively able to fathom this wisely. Thus you
start really understanding Agile and you appreciate the variety and also the
beauty & depth of all that stuff called Agile. Your horizons broaden and
you do not end up fighting with yourself or uselessly arguing with another rookie
on what real Agile is all about. Enter the Performing Stage
The Performing Stage
You will find that this stage coincides with your increasing
confidence levels and also the increasing scores in the tests you are taking and
you intuitively seek to discover the mind-set of the questioner and are able to
come up with the correct answer most of the times. Of course you will trip on those occasional mines, but now they are much less and infrequent. Ah! Finally you have
arrived. Now go for the exam and crack it!! J
The Adjourning Stage
Immediately, after you see the Congratulatory note on the
monitor announcing that you are now an ACP, all that you have painstakingly learnt
and retained with such great difficulty in your memory, would miraculously evaporate, immediately followed by thanks giving to the PMI (After all, your investment in terms of money and time has been amply rewarded J).
All the other stuff you must know to crack the exam
At the time of filling up the application form, you are
asked for the language preference. I had chosen English (US). There are other
languages of preference too. I remember having seen English (UK) also. The English
language spoken in India is more the UK variety than the US variety (though a
lot of US stuff also floats around these days). Even Griffiths cites an example of this
difference jocularly in his book. Am not sure, if this would have a bearing on
the exam but one thing is for sure. We need to know the subtle differences
between synonyms which could make or break your fate with respect to the ACP
exam. It sometimes is irritating because you are not sure, whether the test you
are taking is for Agile or for English. All said and done, every
punctuation, every word matters in changing the meaning of the question and the
answer. So Beware!!
Choose the best of four
You have four options for every question. Generally, you will be
able to eliminate two of the answers straightaway. The correct answer would be
one of the other two answers and the devil might well be hiding in your
understanding of the language than your understanding of Agile. (To a certain extent, this is an exaggeration, but better be armed J)
Also, it is quite possible that all the four answers may be
tending towards the correct answer and each option would be correct in a given
situation. However, you need to choose the most correct answer. The trick here
is get back to the basics – The 4 values of the Agile Manifesto and the 12
principles. The better you remember these, the easier it would be to crack such
questions
There are some absurdly straight forward questions too. However,
look for the correct spellings before choosing the answer.
In some cases, if you find outrageously unheard of terms,
you may reject them outright. But it is also possible that it is you who have
not heard about them (your width of coverage of the subject is in question here J)
There are a few questions that would take a lot of time to
even understand. Give one reading and put it in the back burner (Mark it to review later) and go to the
next. This applies to particularly long questions with short answers and vice
versa. This way you will have enough time to attempt the easy ones available that could
fetch you sure shot marks.
Of the 120 questions, I had marked about 37 that needed more
reading. I still marked an answer but was not very sure, if it was correct. This
way, I had finished all the 120 questions in the first 90 minutes.
Reviewing the
37 marked questions took me close to the next 75 minutes.
Try to be mentally tough and expect late breakers such as
the below:
I had close to 45 minutes of time before the final stroke of
3 hours and I was reviewing the marked questions. Suddenly, a power outage switched
off all the systems and I was numbed beyond belief with a crashing feeling that my money is lost. Luckily,
the software systems are designed such that everything that you had done till
the last second before the power outage gets saved. Everything was brought back
– including the question you were working on last and the timer also, however, the
shock was really rude and had completely disoriented me completely.
Suggest that as you read the books, maintain an excel sheet that
has the topic name with the book name and the page numbers. You may then sort
the topics alphabetically and then simultaneously refer to multiple books based
on the page numbers at a later date for quick and complete reference in respect
to a single topic.
Refer to the Glossary at the end of Crowe’s book, so you
will be able to relate to the terms and concepts easily. I found it really
useful to run through this on the morning of exam.
I recommend a day of rest immediately before the exam because,
frequently attempting the tests multiple times in a day numbs you. The mental
fatigue is telling and you become disoriented. A good night’s sleep on the
penultimate day of exam is very beneficial.
