Whether or not professional certifications are good is an endless debate. What is certain is that they all fall short of meeting all the criteria that would make a certification ideal:

• It tests skills, and not knowledge, not how long you worked in this role, and not who you know (endorsement).
• It is hard to achieve.
• It's globally recognized.

I put a lot of thought in project management certifications lately. Here is a small roundup.

• CompTIA has the Project+ certification for project management.
• IAPPM offers the CPM (Certified Project Manager) certification.
• PMI offers the PMP (Project Management Professional) certification.

• Since methodologies are also important to demonstrate project management skills, I would also include:

  • IBM Solution Designer certification, which focuses on Rational Unified Process, and
  • Scrum Alliance's Scrum Master, which is a big joke in my opinion, and a disgrace to Agile, Scrum, and certifications in general (although that might be changing soon).
• I'd also like to mention Brainbench, which provides lightweight certifications, more like assessments that help employers evaluate employees and candidates.

But who am I kidding... Nobody cares whether a certification is ethical, well-designed, or provides a good learning experience. The only thing that matters is how will it help my career? To answer this simple question I performed a small test that consists in searching Monster.ca with keywords for each of the certifications listed above. The result speaks for itself.

• PMP: approx. 100 (112 hits, with high relevance)
• CPM: 0 (only got hits for "critical path method")
• CompTIA: 0 (got 9 hits but only for tech certs, none for Project+)
• Certified Scrum Master: approx. 25 (50 hits, with 50% relevance)
• RUP: approx. 10 (74 hits, with low relevance)
• Brainbench: 0

In conclusion, if you want to boost your resume as a project manager, it's a no-brainer: go for PMP. Which is quite sad considering that PMP is dogmatic (they call it "scientific", funny since everybody knows that PM is much more an art than a science), knowledge- and endorsement-based (cram the exam and get good references for thousands of "relevant work hours") instead of skill-based (some may think differently). I should also add that I didn't notice any correlation between PMP and good project management so far, but that's only me (again, some may think differently).

Since Agile certifications are a hot topic right now, here are a few more links for you to enjoy (it's fun to read, really):

http://testobsessed.com/2009/03/18/agile-certifications/
http://www.agilecertificationnow.com/agile-alliance-certification.html
http://jamesshore.com/Blog/Why-I-Dont-Provide-Agile-Certification.html

Agile methods such as Scrum stress the use of whiteboard, pen and paper (WPP). While there are very good reasons for this practice, WPP is insufficient for project planning because:

1. It cannot be shown to remote stakeholders.
2. It doesn't allow reporting.
3. It doesn't allow automated calculation (completion, velocity, and so on).
4. It makes it difficult to keep records of changes and past iterations (keeping history is important to improve processes and to track performance).

Consequently, we should complement WPP with a software planning tool.

On the other hand, we want to avoid learning a complex project planning application or depending on a proprietary tool. In other words we want our software project planning tool to be as simple as possible and customizable according to our specific needs.

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