Should I do PMP or Agile certification?
Becoming a project manager is no easy task. The role itself requires a mix of both hard and soft skills. When you add the fluctuating challenges of successful project management, the endeavour becomes even more daunting.
For a long time, the only type of certification that carried with it an undisputed level of expertise has been traditional project management qualifications such as PRINCE2® or PMI® qualifications. In the UK, Australia and Europe PRINCE2 has been the dominant qualification. In the USA and the rest of the world, PMI qualifications dominate.
This article is really aimed at people who are based outside of the UK, Europe and Australia who might be considering a PMI qualification.
In recent years, with the emergence of agile project management certifications, it can be difficult to choose which certification to obtain. This article seeks to answer this question.
Waterfall vs. Agile
To find which type of certification is best for you, you must first determine what kind of career you are seeking in the project management profession. Suffice to say that if you are considering the PMI-PMP® you have a few years of project management experience under your belt. So, what’s next?
Organizations choose either waterfall or Agile project management frameworks based on which best suits their corporate culture, product development schemes, clients and a whole host of other factors.
The Project Management Professional (PMP)® syllabus is based largely on waterfall methods as described in the PMBoK® Guide, while the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (ACP)® and other agile certifications are, of course, based on common Agile principles.
What is waterfall?
Waterfall – sometimes referred to, broadly, as ‘traditional’ – project management involved a lengthy pre-planning process and follows a linear predetermined project schedule. While waterfall may have gained a bad name in some quarters, it actually has a lot of benefits:
- Waterfall projects are predictable, they have a definitive end-date and schedules can be easily built around this.
- It’s generally easier to create forecasts and predictions in waterfall projects because a lot of deadlines are made before development even starts.
- There are clear-cut, easily understood procedures that determine how tasks are planned, initiated, monitored, controlled and closed.
The advantages of the waterfall method make it ideal for certain industries that value the benefits it can bring. Waterfall methods are still used in the manufacturing industry where mid-project scope changes can be costly to the point that they are entirely unfeasible. Change to a project isn’t always desirable or practical, which is where to in-depth pre-planning of waterfall comes into its own.
