Interpersonal Skills for Agile Success On your PMI ACP exam, you will have some questions about interpersonal skills, about emotional intelligence. So this is the part of the course that focuses on and the old adage that the soft stuff is the hard stuff and the hard stuff is really the easy stuff. Well, all right. Well let’s hop in and we’ll talk about what are the interpersonal skills that you need to know as an agile project manager. First off, emotional intelligence. So emotional intelligence, it’s really the ability…

Finding and Detecting Problems. Continuing our conversation about detecting problems in Agile projects. Problems are going to happen, and sometimes they’re really obvious what the problem is. Other times we have to be Sherlock Holmes and do a little detective work to find problems, defects in our project. And a lot of times we have to do that by inspecting, working with our team to get feedback, asking questions. So these are all approaches that we’re going to talk about in this lecture. One of the first places to begin…

Problem Detection and Resolution Section Overview Problem detection and resolution is not a large topic on the PMI ACP exam, and this isn’t a particularly large section. However, these are important topics that if you know these, it’s only going to help you pass the ACP exam, but it’s also going to help you be an agile project manager. So in this section, we have a lot of information to talk about, but it’s all focused on problem detection and resolution. So we’re going to talk about creating a safe…

Continuous Improvement Section Overview One goal of all project managers is continuous improvement. And so we want to continue to get better and better and better. And so that’s a goal that we have in our projects, but it’s also a goal that you’re going to see in the ACP exam. So we need to talk about, about continuous improvement and how it’s directly tied to exam and project success. And that’s the goal of this section. So we’ll begin by talking about continuous improvement in quality, that quality is…

Exploring the Agile Planning Concepts Once we’ve created the user stories, the project team and the product customer, the customer representatives, they’ll work together to begin scoring. How large or how much effort will it take to create eight these user stories. So that’s what this next couple of lectures are about, about project sizing and estimating. One of the first things we’ll do when it comes to estimating a project is to give an estimate range. We talked a little bit about this in the last lecture where we…

Adaptive Planning Section Overview Welcome back. A lot of information that we’ve talked about so far and some more information to talk about of course in this section where we’ll look at one of the key exam themes and that is adaptive planning. That adaptive planning builds on those ideas of progressive elaboration or rolling with safe planning. And then how do we do transparent planning. That’s something we’ll talk about in this section. And then managing expectations and planning cadence all important topics that are centered on adaptive planning….

Completing Quality Management Planning All right, welcome back. We’re going to continue our conversation about quality management planning. Quality management planning We know that planning for quality involves two plans: the quality management plan and the process improvement plan. So let us continue our discussion here. Benchmarking is something that we’ve already talked about, where I compare two systems, two technologies, or two different materials. I can also do benchmarking against two projects. What’s a great way to benchmark projects? Earned Value Management Project A has a CPI of zero…

Section Overview So, what exactly is quality? So many people talk about quality, but it’s never really defined. We’re going to define quality in this section. In order to achieve quality, everybody has to agree on what quality is. So, in this section, we’ll look at what quality is, as well as quality planning and management. So we’re talking about defining our quality policy and our quality assurance. And then, how will you do quality control? The quality management domain consists of only three processes: quality planning, quality assurance, and…

Explore the Critical Chain Method of Project Network Diagrams So we’ve talked about the idea of “floating” in the critical path. I want to wrap this up by talking about the critical chain method. The critical chain method is another project network diagramming approach. It focuses, though, on the project delivery date. It considers the availability of resources, something that we don’t have in the critical path method. So the critical chain looks to see: can I use this resource at these times? Is it scheduled somewhere else in the…

Activity: Finding Float All right, welcome back. Here’s an activity for you to practise finding a float on the critical path. This is what the float exercise looks like. It’s a resource for you in this lecture here. So you can download this as a PDF. However, if you really want to emulate your exam experience, draw this out by hand. So they’re going to show you a graphic like this. And they might say, “How much floats on activity F?” Or if I delay activity C by one day,…