PMI Agile Certified Practitioner

The Project Management Institute (PMI) offers a professional certification for agile practitioners, known as the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) . PMI’s professional certification examination development processes stand apart from other project management certification examination development practices. PMI aligns its process with certification industry best practices, such as those found in the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing1. A key component of this process is that organizations wishing to offer valid and reliable professional certification examinations are directed to use a Role Delineation Study (RDS) as the basis for the creation of the examination. This process utilizes knowledge and task-driven guidelines to assess the practitioners’ competence, and determine the level of salience, criticality, and frequency of each of the knowledge, tasks, and skills required to perform to the industrywide standard in the role of an agile practitioner—that is, professionals who use agile principles, methods, and approaches when working on or leading agile teams.

In order to ensure the validity of the study and content outline developed by the panels, a survey requesting feedback on the panel’s work was sent to thousands of agile practitioners throughout the world. PMI received a robust set of responses to the survey, with participants from various countries and representing most major industries. This provided PMI with the statistical significance from which to draw conclusions about the criticality for competent performance and frequency of the tasks. Practitioners also rated the knowledge/skills on how essential they were to the work of an agile practitioner and when they were acquired.