11.3 PMI-ACP Exam Review & Final Preparation
Key Takeaways
- The current PMI-ACP domains are Mindset (28%), Leadership (25%), Product (19%), and Delivery (28%), comprising 24 official task statements.
- Essential agile metrics include Velocity (capacity estimation), Little's Law (Cycle Time = Work in Progress / Throughput), and earned value metrics like SPI and CPI adapted for iteration tracking.
- Financial prioritization models like Net Present Value (NPV), Internal Rate of Return (IRR), and Expected Monetary Value (Risk Exposure = Probability x Impact) guide product backlog value ranking.
- Situational reasoning should identify the accountable role, ECO task, evidence, value and risk outcome, and any immediate safety, legal, security, or compliance constraint.
- The current exam provides 180 minutes for 120 items and one 10-minute break after items 1-60; starting the break locks the first section.
11.3 PMI-ACP Exam Review & Final Preparation
Use this final review to verify task-level readiness against the current PMI-ACP Exam Content Outline (ECO), not against an old seven-domain model or a collection of framework trivia. The exam allocates questions across four domains: Mindset 28%, Leadership 25%, Product 19%, and Delivery 28%.
Complete Four-Domain Task Review
Domain 1: Mindset - 28%
| Official task | What you should be able to do |
|---|---|
| Experiment early | Build a small increment or experiment that tests solution or market need; create space to learn and innovate |
| Embrace the agile mindset | Apply agile values, classify complexity, interpret suitability tools, and choose or combine approaches for context |
| Promote a collaborative team environment | Establish vision and working agreements, develop a high-performing team, reduce silos, support team decisions, and choose inter-team coordination |
| Build transparency | Make progress, process, risk, impediments, and learning visible; establish feedback loops and communication strategies |
| Foster psychological safety | Encourage objective no-blame inquiry, dialogue, constructive feedback, and challenges to the status quo |
| Shorten feedback loops | Involve stakeholders from the beginning and use small increments, design thinking, or Lean Startup experiments |
| Embrace change | Model a growth mindset, adapt process and priorities, encourage cross-skilling, and adjust the product from learning |
Domain 2: Leadership - 25%
| Official task | What you should be able to do |
|---|---|
| Empower teams | Build trust, motivate experimentation, coach and mentor, promote collective ownership, use emotional intelligence and nonverbal evidence, and interpret team self-assessments |
| Facilitate problem resolution | Investigate root cause with the team, compare value-adding responses, and follow through promptly |
| Promote knowledge sharing | Capture lessons, reuse organizational knowledge carefully, maintain lightweight knowledge assets, and allocate time to share |
| Promote agile principles and practices | Create awareness, foster continuous improvement, and recognize behavior consistent with agile values |
| Promote shared vision and purpose | Establish common understanding, align product decisions with organizational goals, and communicate purpose continuously |
| Facilitate conflict management | Identify the cause and level of conflict and guide the parties toward collaborative resolution |
Domain 3: Product - 19%
| Official task | What you should be able to do |
|---|---|
| Refine the product backlog | Clarify, order, decompose, and collectively size work with customers and stakeholders |
| Manage increments | Align increments with business priorities, define goals, demonstrate value early, and measure results |
| Visualize work | Teach visualization, establish how data stays current, and share information continuously |
| Manage value delivery | Define success across customer, business, sustainability, security, privacy, regulatory, and compliance outcomes; optimize increments and verify results |
Domain 4: Delivery - 28%
| Official task | What you should be able to do |
|---|---|
| Seek early feedback | Deliver small increments, evaluate customer satisfaction, and incorporate stakeholder feedback regularly |
| Manage agile metrics | Select metrics for the audience, radiate them, analyze trends, and use insights for decisions |
| Manage impediments and risk | Identify proactively, engage the team, prioritize response work, monitor outcomes, and prevent recurrence with lessons |
| Recognize and eliminate waste | Visualize end-to-end value flow, use evidence to find waste, prioritize reduction, and iterate |
| Perform continuous improvements | Obtain metrics and feedback, implement an improvement, and evaluate whether it worked |
| Actively engage customers | Analyze needs, validate acceptance criteria, and encourage direct customer-team collaboration |
| Optimize flow | Control WIP, shield the team through explicit interfaces, and use flow metrics to improve |
If you cannot explain a realistic scenario and an appropriate action for each row, return to the mapped section rather than relying on the domain percentage to hide a gap.
Official Tools and Techniques Checklist
PMI's ECO also names nine cross-domain groups. Confirm that you can apply, not merely define, each one:
- Agile Analysis and Design: roadmaps, stories, backlogs, story maps, personas, models, workshops, learning cycles, collaboration games.
- Agile Estimation: relative sizing, T-shirt sizing, Wideband Delphi, Planning Poker, affinity estimating, and ideal time.
- Communications: information radiators, team space and tools, osmotic and two-way communication, active listening, and feedback methods.
- Metrics: velocity or throughput, productivity, cycle and lead time, agile EVM, defect data, approved iterations, and WIP.
- Planning, Monitoring, and Adapting: reviews, boards, timeboxes, release and iteration planning, trends, WIP limits, synchronization, burn charts, cumulative flow, and refinement.
- Process Improvement: Kaizen, Five Whys, retrospectives, tailoring, value-stream mapping, control limits, premortems, and fishbone analysis.
- Product Quality: verification, validation, Definition of Done, continuous integration, and exploratory or usability testing.
- Risk Management: risk-adjusted backlog, risk burndown, and risk or architectural spikes.
- Value-Based Prioritization: ROI, NPV, IRR, compliance, customer value, MVP/MMF, ranking, MoSCoW, and Kano analysis.
Quantitative Review and Assumptions
| Metric | Formula | Correct interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| Pairwise communication channels | (C = N(N-1)/2) | Counts possible pairs; channel count grows quadratically, not exponentially |
| Average velocity | Done points over selected iterations / number of iterations | Team-specific forecasting observation; never compare people or teams |
| Little's Law | Average cycle time = average WIP / average throughput | Use consistent item units and boundaries in a stable system; it relates averages |
| Risk exposure / EMV | Probability x impact | Supports comparison, but qualitative and urgent risks still need judgment |
| SPI | EV / PV | Above 1 is favorable schedule performance against the chosen baseline |
| CPI | EV / AC | Above 1 is favorable cost performance against the chosen baseline |
| NPV | Discounted cash inflows minus initial investment | Positive NPV adds financial value under the assumptions; compare timing and risk too |
Check units before calculating. Dividing story points by hours creates a false conversion; dividing WIP items by throughput items per day produces days. Little's Law does not guarantee that changing a board limit alone will create an identical change in cycle time.
Situational Decision Discipline
Avoid absolute answer tricks such as “always facilitate first.” Instead:
- Identify the role, accountable decision owner, and framework stated in the scenario.
- Determine the affected ECO task and desired customer or team outcome.
- Separate observed facts from assumptions and diagnose the cause when time permits.
- Consider value, feedback delay, flow, quality, psychological safety, security, privacy, and compliance.
- Select the action that addresses the cause with the least unnecessary coercion.
- For an immediate safety, legal, or security threat, contain harm and follow the explicit escalation policy before ordinary facilitation.
In Scrum, remember that scope can be clarified and renegotiated during a Sprint as more is learned, provided changes do not endanger the Sprint Goal. The Product Owner is accountable for Product Backlog management, Developers adapt the Sprint Backlog, and only the Product Owner can cancel a Sprint.
Current Exam-Day Facts
- Items: 120 total; 100 scored and 20 unidentified pretest items.
- Formats: Multiple-choice, multiple-response, drag-and-drop-style items, and exhibits.
- Time: 180 minutes of examination time.
- Break: One 10-minute break after completing and reviewing items 1-60.
- Lock rule: Starting the break prevents any return to items 1-60.
- Delivery: Pearson VUE test center or online proctoring where available.
- Passing score: PMI does not publish a fixed raw score or percentage.
- Retakes: Up to three attempts within the one-year eligibility period; after three failed attempts, wait one year from the last attempt before reapplying.
Pacing rehearsal
An even pace averages 90 seconds per item. A practice plan might target roughly 45 minutes at item 30 and 90 minutes at item 60, including first-section review, then repeat that pace after the break. Adapt to item complexity while preserving review time before each section closes.
Before submitting a section:
- Confirm every item has a response.
- Revisit flagged items within that section while they remain available.
- Recheck calculations and words such as first, next, most, least, and except.
- Start the break only after finishing review of items 1-60.
Read PMI's current ECO and appointment instructions again shortly before testing. Those sources control if any logistics change after this guide's update date.
A Kanban team currently has 15 items in Work in Progress (WIP) and achieves an average throughput of 3 completed items per day. According to Little's Law, what is the team's average Cycle Time?
During Iteration 4, a key business stakeholder approaches an Agile team member directly and requests an urgent new reporting feature to be added to the current sprint. What should the Agile Practitioner instruct the team member or stakeholder to do FIRST?
Which two current PMI-ACP domains are tied for the largest blueprint weight?
You've completed this section
Continue exploring other exams