5 Agile Certifications For Project Management Professionals

Learn the fundamentals of the scaled Agile framework, which helps develop organization and workflow patterns. Learn how to scale lean and build processes that help one team complete a task efficiently.

In this certification, managers will learn to boost productivity, Excellerate product quality, shorten the time to release and increase employee engagement. Of the skills mastered in this certification, developing clear and common objectives is a top priority. It helps managers keep the customer top of mind to be able to provide solutions that add to the company’s bottom line.

The average base salary for a SAFe Agilist is $106,000, but this is dependent on the role of the team member. As a SAFe Agilist Scrum Master, the average salary is $96,465, with a senior project manager averaging $124,928.

Who should use it:

Managers or top-level executives seeking to build better teams with Agile frameworks.

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PMI acclaiming the benefits of an agile project management approach

PMI’s expansion to represent the full spectrum of project management practices has led the organisation to endorse an array of approaches, depending on the particular scenario in hand 

Author: Mark A Langley, President and CEO at Project Management Institute

Project Management Institute (PMI) is urging organisations to continue to embrace project management as critical to their success. The results of PMI’s 2017 Pulse of the Profession: Success Rates Rise: Transforming the High Cost of Low Performance, suggest that organisations are listening. The survey found that in 2016, for the first time in five years, more projects met their original business goals while being completed within budget.

In today’s accelerated market, a culture of organisational agility that enables flexible use of the right approach for the right project is an essential strategy

Compared with the previous year, there was a 20 percent decline in money wasted due to poor project performance. Organisations are now wasting an average of 9.7 percent, or €97m, of every €1bn invested in projects; figures for the previous year were an average of €122m wasted for every €1bn invested. Furthermore, organisations that invest in project management practices successfully complete more of their strategic initiatives, wasting 28 times less money due to poor project performance.

It is encouraging that organisations around the globe are making significant progress in successfully implementing projects – after all, these are the strategic initiatives that drive change. latest improvements can be attributed to a number of factors, including greater organisational agility. Organisations now recognise the value of agility as a strategic competence, rather than a set of tools and templates.

Establishing a common languageAgility is the ability to quickly sense and adapt to external and internal changes to deliver relevant results in a productive and cost-effective manner. Being agile is a mindset based on a set of key values and principles designed to enable collaborative work and deliver value through a people-first approach. Agile transformation is an ongoing, dynamic effort to develop an organisation’s ability to adapt rapidly within a fast-changing environment and achieve maximum value by engaging people, improving processes and enhancing culture.

In today’s accelerated market, a culture of organisational agility that enables flexible use of the right approach for the right project is an essential strategy. As the leading association for more than three million project, programme and portfolio management professionals around the world, PMI has long been an advocate for organisational agility. PMI believes practitioners should consider the full range of project management approaches, from predictive to agile, in determining which method will deliver the best project outcomes.

Varied approachBeing agile is a course of growing importance in project management. The most forward-thinking organisations are embracing a continuum of practices that range from predictive to agile, well defined to iterative, and more to less controlled. Approximately a quarter of organisations use hybrid or customised approaches that match techniques to the needs of the project and stakeholder group. Another approach to project delivery is to take a hybrid approach. Hybrid approaches use a combination of agile and predictive elements, such as a gate review process for continued funding decisions and Scrum for development work.

PMI believes that agile and predictive approaches, as well as other methods, are effective in specific scenarios and situations, a belief that is supported by the company’s research. Organisations with higher agility reported more projects successfully meeting their original goals and business intent – whether they use hybrid (72 percent), predictive (71 percent) or agile (68 percent) approaches – than those with low agility using the same methods. Higher organisational agility supports more projects in meeting their original goals and business intent – one of the key measures of project success.

Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to projects to meet their requirements. Agile approaches allow teams to deliver projects piece by piece and make rapid adjustments as needed. Predictive approaches call for most of the planning to be done upfront, before following a sequential process. However, it’s not necessary to use only one approach for a project. Often, projects will combine elements of predictive, iterative, incremental and agile approaches to take a hybrid approach. It’s important to note that an agile approach is not practised in place of managing a project: rather, it is introduced as a way to speed up the phases of a project.

Practitioners are most successful when managing activities based on the characteristics of each project. With this in mind, PMI recommends evaluating which approach will yield the most successful business outcomes. That was the rationale for offering the Agile Practice Guide, together with A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) – Sixth Edition. In doing so, PMI has brought a broad spectrum of approaches to the forefront of project management that will enable managers to select the method that is ideal for their project.

Fundamental practicesSince its release in 1996, the PMBOK Guide has provided project professionals with the fundamental practices needed to achieve positive organisational results and outcomes, and identifies the practices that are applicable to most projects, most of the time. Additionally, specific and detailed agile approaches to project management appear in the PMBOK Guide. The Agile Practice Guide, created in partnership with Agile Alliance, is a companion to the PMBOK Guide and is intended to serve as a bridge to connect waterfall and agile approaches.

Together, the publications provide critical information spanning many approaches to ensure practitioners can select the method that is best suited to each individual project. PMI’s goal is to help project managers accustomed to a more traditional environment adapt and make use of other project management approaches that may be more suitable to their project. This aligns with increased recognition by practitioners worldwide that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to delivering successful projects.

While the agile movement accelerated after the creation of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development in 2001, it has been part of project management since its early days. With the publication of the Agile Manifesto, agile practices became more formalised, particularly when used to manage software projects. However, over time, being agile has become the mainstay of quick, responsive and flexible work – all of which are desirable organisational traits in the era of constant disruption.

More and more organisations are applying iterative practices to their work, and they now see agile approaches used for some projects in manufacturing, education and healthcare industries, among others. As agility continues to emerge as a response to fleeting competitive advantage, they see more organisations incorporating agile practices – and practitioners who are trained in specific approaches – into their project management portfolios.

Competitive advantageDisruptive technologies are rapidly changing the playing field by decreasing the barriers to entry. More mature organisations are increasingly prone to being highly complex and potentially slow to innovate, which can leave them lagging behind when delivering new solutions to their customers. These organisations find themselves competing with small businesses and start-ups that are able to rapidly produce products that fit customer needs. This speed of change will continue to drive large organisations to adopt an agile mindset in order to stay competitive and keep their existing market share.

Staunch support exists for both predictive and agile approaches, but there is growing recognition that practitioners can be most successful if they manage activities with the approach that suits them best. PMI recognises that there are significant differences between traditional project managers and agilists: each group may have certain biases but, despite real or perceived differences, both have a shared interest in successful project outcomes. With increasing competition and accelerating disruptions from new technologies, market shifts and social change, the need to demonstrate agility is greater than ever.

PMI’s expansion to represent the full spectrum of project management practices has not led the organisation to endorse one approach in particular. Rather, both agile and waterfall approaches, as well as others, are effective in specific scenarios and situations. PMI encourages organisations and practitioners to explore all methods, practices and approaches to drive success and begin to consider what’s on the horizon for project delivery.

How to Go Agile in State and Local Government: Scrum vs. PMBOK

In the past few years, as state and local governments sought to modernize and release more digital services to meet the needs of citizens during the coronavirus pandemic, they have embraced an agile approach to government service delivery.

In some cases, government agencies have partnered with nonprofit organizations such as Code for America to become nimbler in their development of government services.

“Adopting agile, iterative technology can solve some of government’s biggest challenges and have a transformative impact on people’s lives — building more equitable systems, improving outcomes and reducing the poverty gap,” Alexis Fernández Garcia, a senior program director of Code for America's social safety net portfolio, writes in a StateTech blog.

Agile methodologies have been on state and local governments’ radars for several years. A 2021 report from the IBM Center for the Business of Government explores how agencies have been using agile not just for software development but for a wide range of use cases.

Those include project management, human resources management, policymaking, and contracting and procurement. Agile builds and tests iteratively to ensure that what is developed is what the organization wants.

As agencies look to Excellerate their development and delivery of government services to be more responsive to citizens’ needs, they will increasingly — but not exclusively — need to rely on agile approaches and frameworks such as scrum, experts say. At the same time, they face cultural and organizational hurdles to adopting agile methodologies.

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Diego Lo Giudice, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, says it’s important to align with the Agile Manifesto, or the statement of principles that make up the agile methodology, when thinking about how it could apply to government and how scrum fits into that.

For example, in agile, the highest priority is “to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software,” according to the Agile Alliance.

Another key principle is that agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

Within agile, scrum should be seen as a framework geared toward change, Lo Giudice says. Scrum is a way for software development and other teams to execute and adhere to these principles.

“Scrum is about the way that a software team or a blended cross-functional team operates tactically” in day-to-day operations, says Mike Case, director of growth and delivery operations at Nava, a consultancy and public benefit corporation that works to make government services simple, effective and accessible. “How do they figure out how they’re going to prioritize and divvy up the tactical work at a task level?”

Scrum involves several key concepts, Lo Giudice and Case note, including ceremonies such as quick stand-up meetings to check in on the progress of work and ensuring that updates are focused on what team members need from each other and what the key impediments or blockers there are to progress.

Additionally, scrum is focused on autonomy for teams and delivering value for the business or agency. “It privileges communication between people” rather than one person writing a document that is handed over stating what the person requesting a project wants. In a traditional “waterfall” approach to project management, another person would read those requirements.

“Scrum says, sit down and work directly — face to face or through collaboration tools — and communicate,” Lo Giudice says. “It’s communication over contracts.”

Another key element of scrum is to focus on making progress in increments, or sprints. In a sprint, Case says, teams focus on “dividing projects up into smaller chunks so that you don’t have this one giant deliverable in four months; you have a lot of different two- or three-week sprints to break up the project and also assess your progress as you’re going along.”

During that cycle, teams will go through the analysis, design, coding and testing, operating in a fashion of continuous iteration and continuous delivery. This allows teams to start delivering features that are valuable instead of the full product, Lo Giudice says.

“Instead of thinking about the full product, they start thinking about smaller features that can be delivered and added over time to build the product,” he says. “Instead of taking four months and having a big deliverable after four months, you start delivering every two to four weeks.” 

In contrast to scrum sits the Project Management Institute’s Project Management Body of Knowledge, a project management framework that is more prescriptive than scrum. PMBOK emphasizes a significant amount of upfront planning and a high level of detail early on in the development process.

PMBOK defines roles more clearly, Lo Giudice says. It also emphasizes documentation as well as the role of the project manager, who is tasked with maintaining and updating project schedules. In scrum, there is no similar organization and updating of project schedules because teams are self-managed.

In the PMBOK approach, project managers interface with the business and stakeholders and report on the project status. The scrum approach is more transparent and everyone tends to know what is going on because they can look at the progress being made on sprints.

There is no one-size-fits all approach to government service delivery, Case says. In cases where there are strict timeline constraints mandated by a legislature, it may be more difficulty to apply a scrum framework. “You have to pick and choose depending on your requirements,” Case says.

Most government agencies have not full adopted scrum or PMBOK, Case says, “so, even if you’re fully committed to agile, you need to be able to translate and connect that to other methodologies being used in other dependent agencies or systems so that you’re not totally separated.” 

In government, where the creation and launch of new services has historically taken significantly longer than in the private sector, agile approaches allow government software developers, project managers and program specialists the opportunity to iterate more quickly, pivot on projects and get new services out to citizens faster.

Case says it lets them “see the progress, not hear theoretical updates about percent complete, but to see, ‘What does that front-end user interface look like today? OK, they understand it’s not done, but great, you’re heading in that direction. They expect you’re implementing user research that they hadn’t considered. Great, keep going.’”

Agile allows government officials involved in policy creation to get involved in the development of services and make comments that can be easily incorporated into software or service development, Case says. “And if you’re waiting until the end to see working software, you’re more likely as a policy or program expert to hear, ‘Well, that would be too hard now to change or implement,’” Case adds.  

Lo Giudice says that with agile, government officials “will find out sooner rather than later” whether services are shaping up as expected. “You can make mistakes. And the mistakes that you’ll make are much smaller because you’re breaking the problem of it to sub-problems,” he adds. “You won’t find out six months later that this is not what the business wanted.”

LEARN MORE: Find out about how state and local agencies are moving forward on agile.

While state and local government agencies have made progress in adopting agile methodologies and frameworks such as scrum, they face obstacles to doing so, Lo Giudice and Case say.

One major impediment is the structure of government procurement, where contracts tend to adhere to the PMBOK approach for project delivery. Requests for proposals tend to be anti-agile, Lo Giudice says. A better approach might be to, for example, break up a $2 million contract into 10 $200,000 contracts so that the process can be more flexible. “It’s crucial to change how the work is given out to the vendors,” he says.

Doing so is difficult, Case acknowledges, since changing contract development processes that have been in place for years is institutionally difficult. But, Case says, it’s crucial to fund and “make the space for these different ways of working and let new good habits form in those spaces.”

Another big challenge is changing government agencies’ cultures to embrace agile, according to Case. “Doing organizational change like this can be a pretty massive undertaking,” Case says. “And to do it successfully, I think you have to scale it back and start small.”

Government IT leaders who want to implement agile should start small by identifying the most valuable opportunities where they can experiment, whether through procurement circumstances or having the right personnel in place. 

It’s important to not go all-in at first, Case says, and instead try agile on a small scale. “If it’s successful, we’ll introduce this new concept,” Case says.

Cultural changes and changes in the way teams collaborate pave the way for the introduction of new technologies and project management tools that can make approaches like scrum easier to implement. “I think you have to start with the culture and the intent and the change management of processes,” Case says.