Paper 1 asks whether you can lead with AgilePM. Paper 2 asks whether you can still lead with it when the date is set by law, the work is split across two Delivery Teams, and the person who understands the hardest part of the solution is there three days a week.
What This Paper Puts You In The Middle Of
The Doorstep Project is a rebuild of ordering, picking and delivery for a regional co-operative grocer, and almost every question turns on one of four pressures built into the scenario.
A date nobody can move. Amended food information regulations take effect on 1 April, and missing them means withdrawing from online trading in the affected categories. This is the clearest case of Deliver on Time there is, and it changes which responses are even available to you.
Two Delivery Teams that share one order. The Store Team fits out picking stations in Fallowfield. The Online Team builds the app and the substitution logic from the supplier's offices in Bristol. A customer places an order in the app and a colleague picks and substitutes it in the store, so neither team can demonstrate a complete order alone.
Compliance that is somebody's day job. Margaret Oduya is the food safety and allergens lead and attends as a Business Advisor. Where she sits in the work is examinable, and it is not where most candidates put her.
A vision under commercial pressure. Tunde Balogun wants loyalty pricing brought forward because basket value is what the Business Case leans on. Margaret will not trade allergen accuracy against promotions. Ingrid Halvorsen wants a firm total cost by the end of Foundations.
Read the roles table before the questions and note who is part time, who has another job, and who is external. The traps are built on exactly those details.
The Four Areas, And Where The Marks Move
The paper is sixty marks across four areas of fifteen. What follows is where candidates most often go wrong in each.
Fundamentals, Individuals and Collaboration. Principles are tested as justifications, not definitions. You are given an action and asked which Principle best justifies it, so knowing the eight in order is not enough: you have to recognise a Principle at work in someone's behaviour. Reporting is here too, and the answer is rarely more volume. Section 6.3.2 is about tailoring communication to the decision the person has to make.
Risk and the Project Approach. This area carries the distinctions that separate Practitioner from Foundation. AgilePM names an owner for each kind of risk (Section 11.1). The Business Visionary owns Value Ownership risk. The Solution Architect owns Solution Delivery risk. The Project Manager owns Delivery Enablement risk, which includes project organization, schedule, and internal and external dependencies.
The Project Approach Questionnaire has rules worth knowing exactly (Section 11.2.1). It is first completed in Feasibility and reviewed at the end of Foundations and every time Foundations is revisited. Any statement that is not true signals a risk, and all of them are addressed rather than only the alarming ones. It is filled in together, because averaging separate copies hides the disagreement it exists to expose. Approach-based risk also surfaces in Sprint Retrospectives, where ways of working are inspected. The Sprint Review inspects the product.
Requirements, Estimating and Prioritisation. Expect to sort items into requirement types and to hold Product Backlog Item, Product Goal, Sprint Backlog Item and Vision Statement apart from each other. On MoSCoW, the Could Haves are the main pool of contingency and are the first to go when the date is at risk, with roughly twenty percent of available effort allocated to them (Section 9.2.3).
Planning, Control, Governance and Compliance. Management by Exception is precise in AgilePM (Section 10.4.2). An exception arises when the Delivery Team judges the Sprint Goal to be at risk. In basic Scrum the Product Owner handles it. In AgilePM, where the impact reaches beyond the team, it is escalated to the Project Manager as well.
Four Things This Paper Punishes
Putting compliance outside the backlog. Regulatory work is real work and belongs in the Product Backlog, prioritised like anything else. The evidence should be produced by doing the work rather than assembled afterwards, because evidence reconstructed later is both more expensive and less trustworthy (Section 12.2). The regulatory Business Advisor supports the Solution Architect, helps the Product Owner keep the backlog aligned, guides the Delivery Teams during Sprint Planning, and reviews each Product Increment. She is inside the work, not a gate at the end of it.
Protecting a fixed date by the wrong means. When the Must Haves will not fit, AgilePM re-examines whether each Must Have is genuinely essential and identifies the minimum that allows the business to trade legally. Adding people late, extending the Increment, and weakening the Definition of Done are not available to a project with a statutory deadline.
Treating two teams as one big team, or as two projects. Multiple Delivery Teams may share a Product Backlog and one Product Goal, or, in more complex contexts, hold separate Product Goals and Backlogs pulled from a shared Solution Backlog (Section 5.6). A shared Definition of Done and cross-team refinement are what make project-level progress visible. On this project neither team can demonstrate a complete order alone, so anything that inspects one team's output in isolation is answering the wrong question.
Assigning a risk to whoever is nearest the subject matter. This is the single most reliable trap in the paper, and the worked question below is about it.
One Worked Question
In the paper's style, with the reasoning spelled out.
Scenario. Anton Kovar is the Solution Architect, seconded from the ordering platform supplier and contracted for three days a week. He is the only person who understands the supplier's substitution engine, which the April allergen re-check depends on.
Which one of the following best describes how this risk should be owned?
- A. Anton owns it, because it concerns the substitution engine and he is the Solution Architect.
- B. Ceri Morgan owns it, because a single part-time person being the only source of knowledge is a risk to the project organization and its dependencies.
- C. Tunde Balogun owns it, because the April date the engine supports is what the vision rests on.
- D. Priya Raval owns it, because the substitution rules will reach the Product Backlog as her items.
Answer: B.
The reasoning. A is the trap, and it is a good one. The subject matter is architecture, Anton is the architect, and the mapping feels obvious. But AgilePM does not assign risk by topic. It assigns it by kind.
The Solution Architect owns Solution Delivery risk: whether the substitution engine can be built to do what the allergen re-check needs. That is a real risk and it is Anton's. The risk in this question is different. One person, part time, seconded from a supplier, holding knowledge nobody else holds, is a resourcing and dependency risk. Section 11.1 puts project organization, schedule and dependencies with the Project Manager, so it is Ceri's.
C confuses owning the vision with owning every risk that touches it. The Business Visionary owns Value Ownership risk, which is about the value the project exists to deliver, not about who is available to build it. D confuses where the work will be written down with who owns the exposure.
The lesson. Ask what kind of risk this is before you ask what it is about. Most of the Risk and the Project Approach marks turn on that one habit, and a topic-based reading will take you confidently to the wrong answer.
AgilePM is delivered by Altogether Agile, an accredited practice. The AgilePM certification is governed by the Agile Business Consortium, the professional body for Business Agility, and accredited by APMG International. Exam formats can change, so confirm the current specification before you book.