Certified Agile Project Manager (IAPM)

Hello Andrew. I honestly don't know this certification. 

Anyway, I will give my point of view. When you think about Scrum, there's two creators (Jeff and Ken) that maintain Scrum Guide. So, anything not that is not based on Scrum guide is not Scrum. 

End node of Scrum Guide:

The Scrum framework, as outlined herein, is immutable. While implementing only parts of Scrum is possible, the result is not Scrum. Scrum exists only in its entirety and functions well as a container for other techniques, methodologies, and practices. 

The same when you think about agile ... there's one agile manifesto that you must follow:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

When you have the role "Project Manager", it leads to the ideia of command-control practices, that hurts Agile Manifesto. "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools", also, "Responding to change over a plan". 

In other words, when you have a manager on the team, who tells people what to do, how to do it and when to do it, you are neither scrum nor agile. Read about self-management, your answer is there.  

I've never heard of it before this post. I did a quick LinkedIn search for jobs with "IAPM" in them and there aren't too many (even searching globally). For those that do have it called out, it's often in a list with other certifications like the PSM, CSM, and PMI-ACP. I didn't see any instance of it by itself, but I also didn't look at every listing. If companies don't widely recognize the certificate and the backing organization, it may be a fine program, but it may not help you get attention to your profile or get through automated screening programs. You may want to search popular job boards in your area to see if it is more popular in your region or the region where you want to work, though, since I didn't spend a whole lot of time here.

I took a look at some of the documentation that they have online. Not surprisingly, it hasn't been updated for the latest revision of the Scrum Guide. Considering that the latest revision has only been out for a couple of months and there haven't been any drastic changes to the Scrum framework, that's not a big deal. What's more concerning is how they represent Scrum. They identify roles, responsibilities, and artifacts differently than are identified in the Scrum Guide. Kanban and Extreme Programming are simplified, perhaps even oversimplified.

From an organizational perspective, they seem to have similar objectives to the PMI, but may not be as well known. Between the lack of apparent notability from an organizational perspective, the lack of job postings or companies identifying their certificate, and the poor representation of the different frameworks, I'm not convinced that they are really worth the cost. Depending on your career path interests, there are better bets out there for education (including self-study), training, and certification.

Thomas's answer is excellent, much better than mine.

I totally agree.

Hi both,

Thank you for your feedback, I was a bit worried when I read through the their Agile Project Management Guide and it seemed different to the Scrum Guide.

Your feedback appears to back up my concerns.

What drew me to it, is that I'm currently on furlough leave (due to Covid) and want to keep upskilling myself during this time.



Any guidance on the best way to keep up skilling, but being able to "prove" I've kept up-to-date I would highly appreciate :)

 

Professional ScrumTM with Kanban (PSK) seems like a good next step for me.