Lessons learned shared by Tom van Baarle, PMP, PMI-ACP
Yay, I passed my PMi-ACP exam earlier today
Study approach:
in advance:
- 2-day agile estimating and planning course, which I organized myself for our teams.
- +/- 2 years agile experience, coming from traditional PM background
- had already read User Stories Applied, Agile Estimating and Planning, Agile Retrospectives, Scrum & XP from the trenches
actual study, over the course of a few months:
- 2x PMI ACP Exam Prep by Mike Griffiths. Very good book.
- ScrumDan study guide. Very handy summary!
- MindEdge online course (also recommended)
- read/browsed excerpts/large bits from some of the books in the reference list: Highsmith, Shore (big part of the book is available on his website), Cockburn, Adkins. This wasn't in my initial plan, but I was glad I included these.
- read the latest scrum guide
- re-read Mike Cohn's books, as quite some time had passed since I last read these.
- online tests from agileexams.com (very close to actual exam + trigger for reading above-mentioned additional books/parts), simplilearn (also good), proprofs (very very difficult, almost made me panic - assumed literal reproduction of any piece of text from the reference books, grmbl), proplanx, webexamiq.com (quite nice)
As for the online stuff mentioned above: I only paid for MindEdge and Agileexams, the rest is available for free.
The exam itself:
If you prepare well, you should be ok. On my first run through the questions, I marked 30 for review, meaning that I wasn't sure of the answer. All in all: not easy due to the wide scope, but not as hard as the PMP exam which requires more memorization. Encountered less wordy questions on this exam than on the PMP.
If you have additional questions, shoot. Good luck with your preparation!
