PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP®)
Agile practice across frameworks rather than inside one. The course follows the PMI-ACP® Examination Content Outline (by Project Management Institute - PMI), whose four domains — Mindset, Leadership, Product, and Delivery — carry 28%, 25%, 19% and 28% of the exam. The outline is written around enterprise agility: aligning work with organisational priorities, optimising end-to-end flow, and coordinating across teams rather than within one.
What it covers
Foundations and framework fit
Agile values and principles, and where Scrum, Kanban, Lean and scaled frameworks differ enough to matter when choosing one.
Mindset: experimenting early
Building an increment to validate a solution or market need, and creating conditions for teams to innovate, learn and grow.
Mindset: complexity and suitability
Applying complexity models — Cynefin, the Stacey matrix, complex adaptive systems — to classify a situation, interpreting agile suitability tools, and integrating agile models to the use case, team, project or organisation.
Mindset: team environment and safety
Team vision and working agreements, transparency through information radiators, psychological safety and a no-blame culture, shortening feedback loops, and choosing an inter-team coordination approach such as scrum of scrums.
Leadership: empowering teams
Trust and motivation, the difference between training, coaching and mentoring, emotional intelligence, reading non-verbal cues, and interpreting team self-assessments.
Leadership: problems, knowledge and conflict
Root cause investigation with the team, communities of practice and lessons learned, communicating a shared vision, and identifying the level and cause of a conflict.
Product: backlog, increments and value
Backlog refinement and decomposition, collective sizing, increment goals aligned to business priorities, work visualisation, and defining what value looks like including compliance, security and privacy.
Delivery: flow, metrics and feedback
Limiting work in progress, shielding the team, and using velocity, throughput, cycle and lead time, cumulative flow and burn charts to analyse and improve flow.
Delivery: impediments, risk and waste
Proactive identification of risks and impediments, the risk-adjusted backlog, risk burndown and spikes, recognising and eliminating waste, and running improvement actions to a measured result.
Tools and techniques reference
Relative sizing and affinity estimating, value-based prioritisation with MoSCoW, Kano, MVP and MMF, and quality practices including definition of done, continuous integration and exploratory testing.
PMI-ACP exam preparation
Practice across the four domains at their published weights, the 120-item format (100 scored plus 20 pretest) over three hours with one break, and guidance on eligibility, formal training hours, and credit for prior agile certifications.
Who it's for
Product owners, scrum masters, agile project managers, and product development staff working across Scrum, Kanban, Lean, SAFe or hybrid approaches — including candidates preparing for the PMI-ACP® credential.
What's included
- Facilitator slide deck with speaker notes
- Participant workbook and exercise pack
- Templates and worked examples in editable format
- Case studies for group work
- Knowledge checks and end-of-module questions
- Trainer guide with timings and suggested agendas
On completion, participants can
- Classify a situation by complexity and choose a fitting agile approach
- Establish working agreements, transparency and psychological safety in a team
- Refine and prioritise a backlog and define measurable increment goals
- Select flow metrics appropriate to an audience and act on what they show
- Build a risk-adjusted backlog and track exposure through delivery
- Map personal experience and training hours to the PMI-ACP application
Aligned to the PMI-ACP® Examination Content Outline (March 2026 revision of the outline in effect since 8 November 2024); confirm against PMI's published version before each delivery. PMI, PMI-ACP and PMBOK are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc. ManagerDesk.uk is not affiliated with, authorised by, or endorsed by PMI; these materials prepare candidates but do not themselves confer a credential, and only a PMI Authorized Training Partner can issue the formal training hours PMI requires for eligibility.