PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)®

The PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) examination evaluates an individual’s ability to apply agile principles, practices, and tools across four interrelated domains: Mindset, Leadership, Product, and Delivery. Candidates are expected to demonstrate a practical grasp of the agile mindset and its application to team culture, experimentation, feedback, and adaptive planning. Key competencies include creating environments that enable psychological safety, shortening feedback loops through early increments, using systems thinking and complexity models to select appropriate approaches, and tailoring agile models to organizational and product needs. The Leadership domain measures facilitation, coaching, problem resolution, conflict management, and the promotion of knowledge sharing and a shared vision; assessors look for evidence of emotional intelligence, mentoring judgment, and the ability to translate retrospective outcomes into actionable team improvement. The Product domain focuses on backlog refinement, increment definition and demonstration, work visualization, and value management; candidates must understand how to define success criteria that include sustainability, security, privacy and regulatory compliance, and how to decompose and prioritize work for continuous value delivery. The Delivery domain assesses planning and execution methods that optimize flow and reduce waste through practices such as limiting work-in-progress, leveraging metrics and information radiators, and integrating verification and validation techniques like continuous integration and frequent testing. Cross-cutting capabilities include risk identification and mitigation, use of metrics (velocity, cycle time, throughput, cumulative flow), value-based prioritization, and processes for continuous improvement and process tailoring. The exam tests applied knowledge rather than organizational policy or implementation-specific tools; it is bounded to the practitioner-level tasks and enablers defined by the job-task analysis and does not certify specific vendor tools or guarantee mastery of every agile framework. Baseline knowledge expected of candidates includes core agile frameworks (Scrum, Kanban, Lean), estimation techniques (relative sizing, planning poker), backlog and user-story management, basic technical practices (CI/CD, test-driven or exploratory testing), and facilitation methods (retrospectives, root-cause analysis). The examination content is aligned to validated tasks and enablers and assumes prior formal training in agile practices together with practical experience; it emphasizes reliable, repeatable approaches to measure and improve team effectiveness, deliver customer value, and manage compliance and quality concerns within an agile context.