The Agile Practice Guide has a second edition after nine years

PMI updated the Agile Practice Guide for the first time in nine years. It lands at a particular moment, because the PMP exam that started in July splits 60% of its questions between adaptive and hybrid approaches. It is worth knowing what the guide brings and, above all, what it does not promise.

What was published and when

The second edition came out in July 2026. It runs 182 pages and PMI produced it together with Agile Alliance, just like the first one. The detail of what changed was published by Mike Griffiths on the PMI blog on 2 September, and that article holds almost everything that can be stated today about the new edition.

The guide is still framework neutral. It does not endorse one over another and it does not even take the vocabulary for granted. PMI says so plainly, iterations are not always called sprints and the person facilitating is not always called a scrum master. That neutrality was the point of the first edition and it survives intact.

The nine years between the two editions

The first edition is from 2017. PMI sums up the period with a line that sorts things out nicely, what changed in these nine years is not where agile is used but how it is practiced.

Teams spread across cities and time zones. Generative AI walked into planning sessions. And product thinking reshaped how work gets framed and measured. None of those three carried in 2017 the weight they carry now.

The three groups are the ones PMI uses in its article of 2 September 2026. The diagram adds no categories of its own.

What is new

Each group answers a different pressure, so it helps to look at them separately.

• In practice. The binary hybrid label falls away and leaves a delivery continuum, where each team picks the mix of predictive and agile practices that fits. The vocabulary was updated too, backlog grooming is now backlog refinement and daily standups are now daily coordination meetings. And every chapter closes with notes on generative AI, where it can help and where it can do damage if used carelessly.
• In the social side. Psychological safety stops being a nice extra and becomes a baseline requirement for team performance. Sustainability widens beyond the original call for a sustainable pace and reaches decisions that safeguard people, the planet and long-term prosperity.
• In the strategic side. The guide acknowledges that scaling frameworks are already in routine use across large organizations and explains when to think about them. It also adds enterprise agility as the context that now surrounds teams, with a pointer to the Manifesto for Enterprise Agility and the M.O.R.E. principles from the PMBOK Guide 8.

There is one more change that does not fit those three groups and that will ring a bell for anyone studying. The measurement material grew a good deal and moved from counting outputs toward metrics that capture flow, outcomes and value, with the common pitfalls flagged.

What PMI says about its link to the PMP exam

Here it pays to be exact, because this is where the claim is being stretched.

PMI does not say the Agile Practice Guide is PMP exam material. Neither the blog article nor the guide’s own page makes that claim. What it does say, by name, is that for people taking or holding the PMI-ACP certification the guide remains a natural companion for keeping agile knowledge current. That mention points at the ACP.

The standards page adds a broader line, that the guide serves you whether you are learning agile or preparing for a certification, without saying which one. And it mentions connections to PMBOK Guide 8 concepts, among them sustainability, M.O.R.E. and adaptive ways of working.

That is all there is. If you read somewhere that the guide is required reading for the new PMP, it did not come from PMI.

So does it help if you are studying?

This part is our reading and we flag it as ours. The guide is not built as exam material. It does not follow the exam content outline task by task and it brings no practice questions, and the exam is sat against the outline.

That said, there is one case where it genuinely helps. If you come from a predictive world and that 60% adaptive and hybrid sounds like a foreign language, the guide gives you the why behind the practices, which is exactly what the exam assesses. We already looked at how the approaches are split and why hybrid stopped being a loose topic at the end of the syllabus.

And if your problem is a different one, that what you bought went stale, that is another diagnosis and we cover it in how to tell if your study material is out of date. To cover the outline, the outline downloads free from the PMI site and no guide replaces it.

A new book is not the same as a necessary book. This one is worth what it explains, not what it promises.

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