PMI-ACP Certification: Initiation and Requirements Gathering

Agile Planning & Requirements Gathering: Master Agile Project Initiation

This course is the 4th in the Agile Project Management – PMI-ACP Certification Program, focusing on the crucial aspects of Agile Planning, specifically Project Initiating and Requirements Gathering.

Who Should Take This Course?

This course is designed for project managers, program managers, and anyone seeking to effectively contribute to agile projects. It aligns with the Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) exam objectives and Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) learning objectives.

What You'll Learn:

This comprehensive course features training videos, practical examples, exercises, and quizzes. Completing the course earns you 5 PDU’s for PMI certification maintenance and exam preparation.

Why is Agile Planning Important?

Agile development teams utilize rolling wave planning and progressive elaboration, continuously refining plans throughout a project's lifecycle. Effective planning is essential for:

• Reducing risk and uncertainty
• Improving decision-making
• Fostering trust
• Facilitating information sharing with stakeholders

Levels of Agile Planning

Agile teams operate at three key planning levels:

• Release Planning: Collaborate with customers and developers to define high-level requirements, user stories, and the number of iterations for a product release.
• Iteration Planning: Conduct detailed planning for tasks within a specific iteration, informed by previous iteration results.
• Daily Planning: Short, daily meetings where developers discuss progress, immediate plans, and obstacles.

Key Planning Activities

• Release Planning: Gathering requirements, creating user stories, prioritizing stories, estimating stories, grouping stories, and setting a release date.
• Iteration Planning: Updating requirements, confirming user stories and priorities, decomposing stories into tasks, and refining estimates before each iteration.

Business Case & Product Vision

The foundation of any agile project begins with:

• Business Case: A concise document outlining the project opportunity, goals, strategy, vision, milestones, investment requirements, and expected return.
• Product Vision: A description of the product's future – encapsulated in a vision statement – defining who is involved in its creation and how the work will be executed.

Project Scope & Use Cases

• Project Scope: Defines the boundaries of the project, focusing on delivering functionality directly valuable to the customer.
• Use Case: Illustrates how users interact with a system and the expected results, including exception handling for system errors.

User Stories: Defining Requirements

User stories break down high-level requirements into specific, actionable items. They follow the format: "As a , I want to so that I can ." Large user stories (epics) can be broken down into smaller, more manageable stories. Related stories can be grouped into themes.

Course Structure:

This course is divided into two main sections:

1. Introduction to Agile Planning: Learn about the levels of agile planning, the benefits of planning, and activities involved in each phase.
2. Initiating and Scoping an Agile Project: Understand the essential elements of a business case, product vision, and how to analyze and develop user stories.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Recognize the different levels of agile planning.
• Understand the benefits of agile planning.
• Identify activities during various phases of agile planning.
• Understand the essential elements of a business case.
• Identify the elements of a product vision.
• Analyze a use case example.
• Develop examples of user stories.

Ready to enhance your agile project management skills? Take This Course now!