Welcome to the 4th course of the Agile Project Management - The PMI-ACP (Agile Certified Practitioner) Certification Program. This course is focused on Agile Planning and more precisely on Project Initiating and Requirements Gathering.

Who will benefit from taking this course

This course is intended for project managers, program managers, or anyone who wants to efficiently participate in agile projects. It is aligned with the Agile Certified Practitioner exam objectives developed by the Project Management Institute® and Certified ScrumMaster learning objectives.

The course includes training videos, examples, exercices and quizes. And, if you take your time to go through all the learning materials this will entitle you to claim 5 PDU’s for the PMI certification exams and to maintain your PMI certification.

An agile development team uses rolling wave planning and progressive elaboration, refining and adjusting plans at various points throughout a project's life cycle. Planning is beneficial because it reduces risk and uncertainty, improves decision-making, fosters trust, and makes it easier to pass on information to stakeholders.

Three levels of planning

Agile teams focus on three levels of planning. During release planning, the customer and developers collaborate to provide high-level information on what user stories, or features, and how many iterations, to include in a product release.

During iteration planning, a team conducts detailed planning of the tasks to complete in a specific iteration. This planning is informed by the results of previous iterations. Daily planning occurs during brief meetings, when developers discuss their progress, immediate plans, and any obstacles.

Release and iteration planning

In an agile approach, release planning involves gathering requirements, creating user stories, prioritizing stories, estimating stories, grouping stories, and setting a release date.

Iteration planning is more detailed. It involves updating requirements, confirming user stories and priorities, decomposing stories into tasks, and refining estimates before each new iteration begins.

A business case and a product vision

The first step in planning an agile project is developing a business case and a product vision.  The business case is a short document outlining the opportunity that a project represents, the project's goals and a strategy for achieving them, a project vision, milestones, the required investment, and the expected payback.

The product vision is a description of what will be delivered  -  which is encapsulated in a vision statement, of who will be involved in creating a product, and of how the work will be done.

A project scope and a use case

A project's scope is the extent of the work it includes. Using an agile approach, a team controls project scope by focusing only on developing functionality that is of direct value to the customer.

A use case provides an overview of a project's scope. It describes how users must be able to interact with a system, and the required results. It also describes exceptions, or the steps that must occur in response to system errors.

User stories

User stories break down the project's high-level requirements into specific, discrete requirements for particular product functions. They're usually expressed using the wording "As a <role>, I want to <do something> so that I can <achieve a result>." An agile team may need to break large user stories, known as epics, into smaller stories as a project progresses. It may also group related user stories into themes. 

This course will have two main sections. The first one is called Introduction to Agile Planning and the second Initiating and Scoping an Agile Project.

After completing the first section, Introduction to Agile Planning, you  be able to:

• recognize the levels of agile planning,
• understand the benefits of having a plan for an agile project,
• identify activities that take place during the different phases of agile planning.

After completing the second section, Initiating and Scoping an Agile Project, you  will be able to:

• understand the essential elements of a business case,
• identify the elements of product vision,
• analyze an example of a use case,
• develop examples of user stories.

So, thank you for considering this course! Now, go ahead, and hit that "Take This Course" button. And, see you on the inside.