7 Topics To Focus For PMI ACP Certification

The PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI ACP)® certification validates candidates’ skills in agile principles and agile techniques. This certification increases their professional value among employers, stakeholders, and peers. PMI ACP certification holders are confident as their certification is designed according to the best practices of test development and it is based on the feedback from the practitioners who establish those standards.

7 Topics To Focus For PMI ACP Certification

The PMI-ACP® is the rapidly growing certification of PMI and companies that are agile and responsive to the changes in the market, complete more projects successfully than their counterparts. The PMI ACP covers other approaches to agile that include Kanban, Scrum, Lean, extreme programming (XP), and test-driven development (TDD). This way, it also increases the candidates’ versatility on the basis of projects assigned to them.

The prerequisites to apply for the ACP certification are:

  • 2,000 hours of general project experience while working on teams. A current PMP® or PgMP® certification will fulfill this requirement but it is not required to apply for the PMI-ACP.
  • 1,500 hours of work experience on agile project teams or with agile methodologies. This requirement is to be fulfilled along with the 2,000 hours of general project experience.
  • Training in agile practices for 21 contact hours.

If you are working on agile teams or if your company is adopting agile practices, then earning a PMI-ACP certification is a good choice for you. As compared with other agile certifications that are based solely on training and exams, the PMI-ACP is the proof of your real-world, hands-on agile experience.

Here we have listed the domains of PMI-ACP certification and their percentage:

  • Agile Principles and Mindset: 16% 
  • Value-driven Delivery: 20% 
  • Stakeholder Engagement: 17% 
  • Team Performance: 16% 
  • Adaptive Planning: 12% 
  • Problem Detection and Resolution: 10% 
  • Continuous Improvement (Product, Process, People): 9%

So, want to a PMI ACP certified professional and enhance your job prospects? Then what are you waiting for? Start your prep today with uCertify!

5 Project Management Tips for Content Marketers

Most of the time, marketers are believed to be creative geniuses who are able to produce ideas by putting their innovative skills to work, without possessing too much organizational or project management talents.

While this can be true in some cases, as even John William Gardner once said that “Creative minds are rarely tidy”, it is precisely creativity that can help the creative content marketers turn into strong project managers. With a little bit of discipline, planning, and teamwork, combined with your creativity, you can turn project management into a piece of cake.

5 Project Management Tips For Creative Content Marketers

Below are some tips to help you achieve your goals and keep your team focused.

Don’t Over-complicate Things

The road to reaching the best results is often the simplest one. When developing a project, you don’t have to come up with complex charts and plans, but simply create a formula and stick to it. A simple only needs to contain an outline of the entire development of the project, split up into steps. This is as simple as it can get:

  • Initiate: Determining what type of project is best for marketing your business, based on your goals;
  • Plan: After deciding on your project, it’s time to outline how you are going to develop it;
  • Execute: This phase involves putting everything into motion towards creating the project;
  • Monitor and control: Constantly reviewing the team’s progress;
  • Close: Reviewing how the project helped your business grow.  

Have Clearly Defined Goals

In order for you and your team to know what type of projects are worth putting your effort into, you need to have clear goals and be aware of what you want to achieve. For example, if your main goals are to increase traffic and subscribers, while also build a larger customer base, you need to put all your time end effort into projects that will help your business achieve that.

Make sure to keep your goals reasonable and realistic, otherwise, you might find yourself biting more than you can chew. If you present your team with a list of 15 projects that need to be accomplished by the end of the week, they might not know exactly where and how to start working towards them. And, most importantly, they might not know which of them are going to better help the business achieve the set goals.  

This is why prioritizing is extremely important. To prioritize your project, you can choose a simple rating method, where you can list all your projects and rate them on a scale of 1 to 5. “5” means the project will significantly help you achieve your goals, while “1” means it can probably wait a bit more.

Evaluate Your Resources

After you have decided on a project, it is time to determine what resources go into its development. This includes tools and budget, as well as talent. Your project should not be influenced by the resources, but the other way around.

“Projects that could really impress your audience should not be set aside, just because you don’t consider you have the necessary resources. Instead, work towards obtaining them. This is where the creative genius inside you has to come out and do what it knows best: get creative,” says James Daily, head of the content department at FlashEssay.

Keep in mind that sometimes, it is better to concentrate all your resources towards a project that could drive immense growth for your business, rather than divide them into multiple projects that will only drive moderate growth.

Schedule Your Tasks

When working at a project, you might find it more effective to break the project into separate tasks and set deadlines for them. This way, you can focus on finishing them in order of importance for the main project.

Hold a meeting with the entire team involved in the project execution and start splitting the tasks based on each member’s skills. This way, you can make sure that everyone is contributing to the project in the best possible way. Make sure to ask for time estimates as soon as everyone knows what their task is, in order to make sure you will hit your deadline.

It might be best to plan everything with a calendar that everyone has access to, in order to get things done in a more effective way. This will ensure that everybody knows exactly when the deadline is, what their tasks are what other important events might happen along the way. On the other hand, this will give you a clear view and, in case something does not go as planned, you will know whom you need to talk to.

Plan Constant Reviews

In order to avoid unplanned situations, such as one member of the team not completing their task, you need to constantly review the progress.

“Simply asking everybody where they are with their task can sometimes be enough to give you a clear idea, but it is better to schedule regular meetings, in order to gather the whole team and receive updates on their progress. Based on the deadline, the meetings can be scheduled daily, twice a week or even weekly,” advises Veronica Wright, CEO at Resumes Centre.

Good creative content gets done better when you have a clear strategy in mind, and by applying project management methodologies, you can achieve exactly that and much more. This way, deadlines will not be a scary date on a calendar anymore, but a clear milestone towards your final project.

Danielle Levsky Reviewed Project Management for Engineering and Technology Course

Danielle Levsky is an experienced Project Manager with industry knowledge in instructional design, blended learning, curriculum development, graphic design, UX, and more. She is currently working as a Technical Instructional Design Specialist at BenchPrep. Recently, she reviewed the uCertify Project Management for Engineering and Technology course. We are happy to share the feedback that she provided:

Project Management for Engineering & Technology Guide Review

“I found the chapters and visual representation of the Project Management for Engineering and Technology course effective. The elements of the course, pre-assessment, chapters & lessons, and post-assessment, are based on exam objectives. The results page for the pre-assessment was helpful in understanding how my score correlated to certain lessons and subjects within the course allowing the learner to see which answers were correct/incorrect was also helpful.”

To read the complete post, click here.

Thank you Danielle for taking out time and providing the feedback! We are looking into the areas of improvement suggested by you.

To know more about Danielle, contact via her LinkedIn profile.