Mike Griffiths Pmi-acp Exam Prep Pdf

[Bartolome Beacham]

Forthe entire month of September, I only watched the Agile Prepcast videos. I spent about 1-2 hours on it in every sitting. I somehow managed to watch most of the podcasts by September-end. On Oct 1, 2013, I took the 25 question final exam for Agile Prepcast and got a score of 23. That was good enough for me to get my 37 PDUs certificate.

On the same day, immediately after getting my PDUs certificate, I went to the PMI website and submitted my PMI-ACP exam application. While my application was being processed by PMI, I received my PMI-ACP Exam Prep study guide from Amazon. It turned out (somewhat surprisingly) to be a fantastic book - well-written, nicely organized, and concise. I read it cover to cover in just 4 (extended) sittings over 2 consecutive weekends. You can read Book Review - PMI-ACP Exam Prep by Mike Griffiths for my full review of the book.

PMI-ACP exam is mainly focused on Scrum, XP, Lean and Kanban. None of the other methodologies/frameworks found a mention on my exam. About 50% of the questions had Scrum or XP mentioned on them. About 10% were on Lean or Kanban. The exam also gives emphasis on Agile values and principles (about 5% questions). I also remember seeing lots of questions on Estimation. I saw a few questions on Agile Earned Value Management, a topic that was not covered well in most study material that I used. Overall, I felt under-prepared on important topics and over-prepared on topics, which were not even touched in my exam.

The 3 hours of allotted time is more than sufficient. Anybody who has taken the exam would tell you the same thing. I could have finished the exam in 90 minutes and saved the remaining 90 minutes to blog about it, but I chose to utilize it all by reading, re-reading and re-re-reading the tricky questions. As I mentioned in the beginning of this post, I had some really tricky questions in the beginning of the exam that put me into a defensive frame of mind early. I read the questions very thoroughly (almost memorizing them) and answering them very carefully in the first pass.

I felt that the exam questions were very intelligently designed and required thorough understanding of the subject to answer correctly. Most questions were just one-liners, but the answer choices were superbly well-crafted (and super tricky). My breakup of the questions based on their difficulty level was:

PMI-ACP exam has 20 pre-test questions. I could only hope that most of those last 20 were in the pre-test category. I also saw about 2-3 questions that I thought were poorly worded or had incongruent question and answer choices.

Another small, and perhaps irrelevant niggle - I was shocked to see that the test center had those old ball-type mice. Mine was somewhat old and made a cranky sound, loud enough to distract the neighbors, each time I used the scroll wheel on the mouse. For a moment, I wondered whether it was 2013 or 2003. I put that feedback in the survey.

I did not read any of those 12 books simply because I was on a fast-track schedule. I made up by reading lot of free content online. Also, as I mentioned earlier, I took a 3-day Scrum Master class last year (and got my CSM certification) that helped me immensely in understanding the Agile values, principles and concepts, and of course he Scrum framework. I used the following study material for my preparation:

Congrats Harwinder! Thanks for such detailed information on your experience. I also had this feeling that PMI-ACP would be easy and not really challenging. As ACP is really supposed test on basic level understanding on agile concepts unlike PMP which is more management oriented. The difficulty must be with respect to questions being analytical reasoning and twisting kinds that PMI usually have in every exams. I even was wondering whether is it even worth going for this ceritifcation. And may be PMI may bring in some advanced certification on agile? Looking forward to your updates and tips. I hope to take this exam in Jan. Your comments are very valuable. Thank you.

Thanks, Ramesh.

I have just updated the other sections of the post. The exam questions were actually one-liners, but the answer choices were very tricky (twisting kinds like you said). Almost every other question seemed to have 2 correct answers. About 10 questions had even 3 very close answer choices. Still I think this exam is better designed than the PMP, which is heavily based on ITTOs, though both have a fair share of situational questions.

Good luck for your exam.

Thanks Harwinder. I have re-read your post :) I will be checking regularly for your useful posts. Great work! I would suggest everyone to read Mike Cohn "Agile estimation and planning", "User stores applied"" and Lyssa Adkins - Coaching agile teams. These are wonderful books, not just for preparing for ACP but to learn a lot of useful stuff. Servant leader is covered by her. Its more important i think, to keep the 12 principles of agile in mind all the time. Yes, there is a good chance of applying pmp mindset here fr the questions. But as you said this is nothing to do with management at all, so it should be applied. Even the accountability is by the entire team, self-organized one. My only worry is in finding really good mock exams. Thanks again

Thanks for your insightful comments, Ramesh. I'm sure your comments will add value to anyone reading this post. I have Mike Cohn's book that I received during my Scrum Master class. I didn't really read the book, but I have been following his blog. He shares really good information on his blog.

If you come across good quality mock exams (or even other resources) during the course of your preparation, do let me know and I'll share them with the readers.

Thanks.

Harwinder,

I have one question on ACP exam for application ie, is it similar to PMP application? since for people who hold pmp credential, can they skip providing those details for work hours? how is this done? sorry, if this is silly question.

Hi Ramesh,

The PMI-ACP application process is really simple. You just need to mention the Project Names (which used Agile methods) and the number of hours spent on those projects. Since I worked on just one large project for the past 15 months, I just mentioned that one project. That's it.

Even PMP application process has been simplified a lot of late, but PMI-ACP application process is simpler.

Hope that helps.

Congratulations on your success! I have to agree that underestimating PMI-ACP in comparison to PMP can be a disaster. Both have their strengths and weaknesses - while one has 600+ ITTO's, the other gives you 11 reference books to prepare! Not only that, unless you use carefully prepared question banks, your investment of time in practicing will be just worthless. We understand that pain (we created some of the best PMI-ACP question banks at ); it is time intensive and requires great commitment to bring it up to mark.

Also, as you rightly said, practicing 1000s of questions is no guarantee for learning, it is in the quality. So, I suggest PMI-ACP aspirants to look around before investing time and money. Good luck to all!

Vedananda Venkata

Harwinder,

Kindly check the last line under Exam difficulty level section. This is not to critize but i think i meant something and by mistake typed something entirely different. "Do not understand PMI-ACP" is certainly not the intent, i read it as " Do not underestimate PMI-ACP" i believe. If that is so, correction may be necessary so that others dont take it as such. Absolutely dont mean to offend.

Thanks

Ramesh

Hi Harwinder,

There is new site offering free ACP training among others. If its possible, kindly do review the content for quality and share your valuable feedback. And its absolute free content for now.

Regards

Ramesh

Hi Ramesh,

I'm aware of it but haven't had a chance to review it yet. Recently I had some discussion with their team and tried to understand if there's any catch. It seems that at least for now they are offering the course for free. I'll take a look and share my comments. Thanks for bringing it up.

Best regards,

Hi Harwinder,

Congratulations ! I am scheduled to take ACP exam in two more days. I have been reading only one book 'PMI-ACP Exam prep by Mike Griffiths'. I know its too late to ask, but do you think this book covers all the content for the exam. I have been assuming that there will be no questions out of context of this book. Please advise.

Hi Madhuri,

There were a few topics outside of Mike's book on the exam, but I can't tell whether those were counted or not (pretest). The exam seemed very heavily focused on Scrum and XP. So focus more on those in the last 2 days. Attempt as many sample questions online as possible. Understand the Agile Values and Principles were very. You'll need to apply them on many questions on the exam.

Let me know how your exam goes.

Good luck.

Finally its over, I passed the exam. Focusing more on Scrum and XP on the last two days before the exam helped alot. Thank you for suggesting ScrumDan's document, i got atleast 10 questions correct just because i read it. I got 'Moderately proficient' in both Techniques and K&S.

Congrats Madhuri. Considering youe study plan, i think i may have overdone it. I have been through nearly 9 of 11 reference books mentioned by PMI.

Other than that i read Lean agile software development - an agile toolkit by Mary and Tom Poppendieck (it was very good)

For XP - art of agile development

For Scrum - APM with scrum by ken schwaber

I hope this should be sufficient. Yet to book exam date.

I have done some exams as mentioned by Harwinder.

Unable to find that good mock exams.

Hello Ramesh,

I kind of agree with you on the point of mock exams. There are not many good mock exams available for PMI-ACP, at least not the free ones. You may want to look at Velociteach (by Andy Crowe). Though I have not tried them personally, I heard some good comments.

If you find other good sources, do let me know.

Good luck.

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