This is the first article in a series on Agile Certifications, Career Advancement, Exam Prep and Advanced Learning I am writing for www.ProjectManagement.com that I will also post here.

Many people believe agile methods and certifications are like oil and water. One is a context-sensitive, adaptive framework; the other is a prescriptive, rigour-based measurement model. Certifying agile methods is like trying to bar-code clouds – a misapplication of quantification in a domain that resists it.

Yet, if the research organizations are to be believed and Gartner’s predictions of agile being used in 80% of software projects, there are a large group of people doing it. Whenever an in demand skill exists in the workforce a few things happen:

1. Hiring managers and recruiters want a way to screen and identify potential skilled applicants
2. Individuals want certifications to recognize their skills and knowledge within a domain. (Both to promote themselves for career opportunities and for personal development.)
3. Organizations want roadmaps for employee growth and career development.

Certifications help address these needs. Of course certifications do not guarantee competency, job suitability, experience or even knowledge. They are not substitutes for interviews, background checks, or references, but they are a tool frequently used to pre-screen candidates before these activities occur.

Most people realize that certifications are neither evil nor silver bullets; they are instead an inevitable side effect of a maturing integration of agile into the work place. Future articles in this series will examine the value of certification and pitfalls of certification, but to begin with let’s get an appreciation of the popular agile certifications available, focussing in the project management space.

Certified Scrum Master – CSM is probably the most widely held agile based certification. Starting in September 2012, passing a multiple choice test is now required to be awarded the CSM designation. Up until this date the CSM was awarded to everyone who successfully completed a two day CSM training class.

If your organization uses Scrum then a Scrum based certification makes sense. The number of Scrum related certifications and offering bodies has exploded in the last couple of years. It is now possible to obtain Certified Scrum Master, Certified Scrum Practitioner, and Certified Scrum Developer designations, amongst others from the Scrum Alliance. Also available are Professional Scrum Foundations, Professional Scrum Master, and Professional Scrum Developer from Scrum.org and Scrum Master Accredited, Scrum Team Member Accredited from the International Scrum Institute.

Agile Certified Practitioner - PMI-ACP is a new certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI) that tests knowledge of agile, lean and kanban approaches. Similar to the PMP exam, the PMI-ACP exam requires experience working on projects, a mandatory training requirement, and a multiple choice test administered by a Prometric Test Center.

The PMI-ACP exam requirements are: 2000 hours working on any kind of project, plus 1500 hours of agile experience. Candidates must also have 21 contact hours of agile related training and then sit a 3 hour, 120 question exam. Further details can be found here

 Less well know agile certification options include:

The “Software Extension to The PMBOK Guide” is available for public review here. It is a PMI hosted site, but you do not need to be a PMI member to access the draft. This is the first full exposure of the draft. It was completed earlier in the year and sent to some subject matter experts for review, but has not been made publicly available before. So, if you have an interest in how the PMBOK Guide should be augmented/modified for software projects take a look and submit you comments.

As a parallel, the Extension to the PMBOK Guide for Construction, has been available for a number of years and it offers guidance to project managers in the construction business. The role of the Software Extension, is to fulfil a similar role, but this time for managers of software projects that often face changing requirements, evolving technologies, and bringing together divergent knowledge workers to collaborate on challenging problems. For these project environments the Software Extension describes a spectrum of Predictive, Adaptive and Agile Lifecycles that may be used and more people based, as opposed to process based, development strategies.

I know asking how the PMBOK Guide can best be changed for software projects will likely prompt some colourful suggestions, but that’s half the fun. We will have to review all the suggestion and having the odd passonate suggestion brightens up the review process. I once worked with a developer who used a copy of the PMBOK Guide to raise the level of his monitor to approximately the same height as his other monitor. When he heard I was working on the next version of the PMBOK Guide he said that he uses his copy every day, and it was indispensable, but could we add another 10-15 pages to the next version (so his monitors would be perfectly aligned).

So, please take a look, we really do value your feedback, both good and bad. The role of the Software Extension is to modify and extend the PMBOK Guide recommendations for project managers in the software industry. It will be published in mid/late 2013 with your feedback incorporated or politely passed over, as we see fit.