Scrum Master

"You will be scrum master of this from next week!" These are the words that you hear and then you find yourself in a mess. You really don't know what to do from next week? Your first reaction should be "Will I be a full time scrum master or a part time one?"

Affinity Estimation

Ingredients:

How I passed PMI ACP exam

Dear Friends,

I will give you some tips and hints to help you complete you PMI ACP i.e. Agile Certified Practitioner exam in the first go.

Step 1) Real life experience:

I agree with PMI's criteria that we need to have 1500 agile project experience. It gives you good knowledge about how things can go right or wrong practically. So if you do not have that real life experience, then please get it. It really helps you to solve atleast 20% of the PMI ACP exam questions.

Step 2) Classroom training:

This 3 day training was also important to know some unknown things in agile, lean and kanban.

Step 3) Books:

My main study guide was the book from Mike Griffiths: PMI-ACP Exam Prep. I read it three times.

First I read the book in fast pace. I focused on headings and diagrams. After reading each chapter, I also solved the exercise at the end of the chapter. For the first time I got only 50% answers correct.

Second time I read the book in full details. I also carefully read those sections, for which I got wrong answers in the first time exercise. Then I solved the exercise and this time I got 70% correct.

Third time I read the book with 100% attention to each and every word. (remember to read each and every word) Now, this time I got 100% correct answers when I solved the exercise (may be because I would remember the answers by then).

Step 4) Solving the online exams:

Each time I completely read the book, I also solved questions from below links. Some of those are free and some of those are paid. I recommend to solve free ones first :) Paid ones are also equally worth. Paid ones cost you from $3 to $10, which is worth than not doing it & putting $495 at stake. From free ones, I got approximately 20% similar questions in my exam. From paid ones like udemy, I got approximately 50% similar questions in my exam. edward-designer link is like a composite of all the online guidance. Remember the questions are not exactly same. Those are similar and you will get fair idea of the difficulty level and also you will get to know your gaps.

a) PMI ACP practice exam with 1500 questions

b) https://girlinthepinkcloud.com/pmi-acp-exam-questions/

Step 5) During the exam:

First read the question carefully and understand grammar of it. If it is easy, solve it. If you are in doubt, mark it and go to the next question. After you solve all easy ones, solve the marked ones. This should leave you with 30 minutes. Now in those 30 minutes, review carefully each answer of all those 120 questions. I am sure you will change answers of at least 5 questions (because your brain keeps on thinking).

Out of 120 questions, I was able to solve 80 questions with ease. Those werevery straight forward (based on my knowledge and experience). 20 questions were little tricky, but if you think twice, then they were reasonable. Rest 20 were very difficult and I had to spend 1 hour to solve those.... and I am sure I might have scored 0 in those 20.

Suggestion: Apart from the suggested book above, also read other books on lean, kanban and XP. Also browse one website related to these topics daily. This will help you to solve those 20 tricky questions.

Best of luck!

Agile: To be or not to be

Greetings everyone. This article is about a fantastic dilemma for any leadership about if we shall decide for the organization to follow agile or not.

Now-a-days Agile is the buzz word. If you are a leader in your organization, and meet some one at any business conference or seminars you would probably be asked the question "So, do you follow agile?". And then if you already are agile, then you are lucky. But if you are not yet agile, then you fall in the dilemma "To be agile, or not to be?" And the person who asked you in the first place, is also not sure about why s/he went on agile?

Now, first of all, it would be a bad idea to arrive at your cabin one fine day and announce that from today we all will be agile. You need to do some pre-work and feasibility study to make some informative decision about agile adoption.

1) Type of your product/customer
This is the era of competitions. Faster and Consistent wins the race. You need to ask yourself "Does my customer want faster delivery?", "Is s/he ready to spend time daily with my development team?", "Do we need to release frequent updates to our product?", "Are we clear about the vision of the product?", "Is the market ready for frequent updates to the product?", "At what speed my competitors are coming up with new product ideas?"
Agile will be valuable when -
- customer has enough time to spend with your development team.
- market is ready to accept frequent updates to the product.
- there are many competitors coming up with new ideas every now and then.
- there are changing requirements based on market direction.

2) Early to market
By following different agile methodologies, we can bring our product early to market. This helps to make the consumers use the product with its bare minimum features. If our product development can be done early in chunks of features, then agile is best suitable for it. For e.g. new mobile device - can be launched early in the market with bare minimum features of calling and texting. Later we can add camera, Bluetooth and hundreds of other features in chunk.

3) Early ROI
Once we bring the product early in the market, we start getting return on it early. If we are looking for early ROI, then we surely can go for agile.

4) Continuous feedback
As the product is being used by end customer, and we invlove our customer in the product development, we start getting regular feedback on the product deliveries. This helps us improve the product as well as the process. This way we can also come to know changing priorities in the market.

5) Type of work
If the type of work required to build the product is repetitive, then agile might not be a good choice. Agile is best suitable for creative product developments. e.g. if your team works on software installations, then it might not require agile. If your team works on developing a internet banking website, then it will get benefited from agile.

6) Adaptability
Every change follows reluctance to change. If your organization is flexible and adaptable to changes, then agile implementation will be smooth. Agile demands complete shift in the mindset of each and everyone involved in it. Everyone from the top management to the actual development team should be open for this change. Training helps but the continuous coaching is required to transform the team into a successful agile team.

7) View of IT department
Do you look at your IT department as a cost center? If yes, then it will be hard to change the mindset of people. IT department, in agile, should be looked at as a valued partner. This will help in improved customer involvement and improved team collaboration, which are the basics of agile manifesto.