Becoming a PMI Registered Education Provider

As you may know by now, I left my gig advising a Federal PMO to join LitheSpeed as a senior manager. LitheSpeed, as you likely know if you're on this site, offers premium Agile software development training, coaching and management consulting services. My relationship with the organization actually started several years ago, when I attended a ScrumMaster training to earn my certification. (You can't be a Certified ScrumMaster through the Scrum Alliance unless you get your training from a Certified Scrum Trainer®.) Well, the world is evolving and so is LitheSpeed.

See, Certified Scrum Trainers (CSTs) play a vital role within the Scrum Alliance. They are the only ones licensed to teach CSM and CSPO courses. Stringent certification requirements are imposed on CSTs to make certain that only those who are qualified to meet the commitment are entrusted to engage in this role on behalf of the Scrum Alliance.

Well, what about those out there who are members of the Project Management Institute? What about those seeking the upcoming PMI® Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)^SM certification? If you want to qualify to sit for the PMI-ACP, you'll need 21 training hours in an Agile-specific curriculum. To ensure members of the PMI know LitheSpeed offers quality training that will help satisfy that requirement, we applied to and were approved to be a PMI Registered Education Provider (R.E.P.).

What does it take to become a PMI R.E.P.? Applicants must complete a 33-page application, which includes a strict quality review of both the trainers and the curriculum. The first class we submitted and got approved was our Certified ScrumMaster course; next will be our Certified Product Owner and PMI-ACP Prep courses. As an R.E.P., LitheSpeed has been approved by PMI to issue Professional Development Units (PDUs) through the PMI website. Our goal is to equip our trainees with tools they can apply to current and future projects, not just help them qualify to take an exam.

PMI recognizing Agile publicly (at the PMI North American Congress last October) was a huge step.  Establishing a separate certification for Agile practitioners was also huge. Because there is a clear market need, it's critical for us to evolve along with PMI, expanding our offerings to ensure PMI members have the proper introduction to Agile approaches.

PMI® and the PMI® Registered Education Provider logos are registered trademarks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
PMI-ACP^SMis a service mark of the Project Management Institute, Inc.

What to Consider When Hiring User Experience Specialists

One of the questions I often get from our clients is, "What kind of designers or user experience specialists have the appropriate experience or skill set for working in an agile environment?"

In general, there are a number of different but related specialties in this field, the broadest definition of which has tended to be "user experience." Some of these include user experience (UX) research (understanding what users do and want and translating that into appropriate feature sets and designs), information architecture (IA) (organizing information, search and navigation theory, site structure, etc.), graphic design (visual representation of information or ideas), interaction/user interface (UI) design (visual design of interactive systems), and web design (front-end coding and scripting expertise in HTML/CSS/Javascript along with some UI design chops). Those who call themselves User Experience (UX) Designers often blend information architecture and UI design skills, and occasionally possess some coding ability.

There are two basic models that you most often see for these folks in an agile environment:

1. One widely experienced person in each team that blends a bit of all of the above, who would likely be called a UX/UI Designer or something of that nature. Some teams just have developers with skills in interface design, so the particular title differs widely, but it will likely have "designer" in the title.
2. A central UX group that helps multiple teams with user research, common style guides and UI design, often lending their members part-time (roughly 30-50% in many cases) to help execute designs within certain sprints.

More info on UX basics (and hiring) can be found here:

· An overview of what UX looks like in Agile teams: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2011/04/integrating-ux-into-agile-development.php
· An old ad which captures some of the basic skills: http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/2009/12/24/were-hiring-a-uxia-expert-and-a-web-designerdeveloper/

- Arlen