Agile, Rewritten for the AI Era: PMI's New Agile Practice Guide

Recording of the free INSTAR webinar held on 14 September 2026. The session is in Ukrainian.

Velocity is out as a management metric. Servant leadership has been renamed supportive leadership. RACI is replaced by RAF. Psychological safety has grown from a paragraph into a full section with its consequences worked through step by step. This is the second edition of the Agile Practice Guide, published by PMI and Agile Alliance in July 2026, nine years after the first.

Alina Piddubna read all 182 pages and works through them as a practitioner who manages a portfolio of programs for European technology clients. What changes your work, what reads as good intentions on paper, and what is worth applying next week.

The reading runs through anti-patterns you will recognise: a retro on Zoom with the cameras off, where two people out of eight speak. Stories that migrate from sprint to sprint. Waterfall inside a sprint. People allocated 30% across three projects at once. A daily that has turned into a status meeting for a manager. Each time the question is the same: what does the new guide actually do about it.

There is also the direction of travel. PMI dropped the predictive-versus-agile split in favour of a continuum, where hybrid stops being a compromise. The focus moved from the team's work to the value of the product, and the PMO moves with it toward a product management office with a financial function. Alina's forecast: PMI's next practice guide will not be about agile at all, but about choosing a combination of practices for a given delivery.

And the exams. The new PMP exam under the 2026 ECO launched on 9 July, and the second edition followed a week later. In the new ECO roughly 40% of items cover predictive approaches, and the remaining 60% is split between agile and hybrid. PMI-ACP is built entirely around these practices.

Speaker

Alina Piddubna, Account & Delivery Director at Intellias, Director and Lead Consultant at INSTAR. Practitioner in project management since 2008, teaching other practitioners since 2015. Contributor to the PMBOK Guide, Eighth Edition. PhD in Economics. Certifications: PgMP, PfMP, PMP, PMI-ACP, PMI-CP, PMO-CP, PMI-CPMAI, AWS Solutions Architect Associate.