Project Manager in Agile World

Good day...

Picture credit: bykst

Today I would like to share with an interesting topic with regard to being a good project manager in an Agile world. As you might already know, in Agile delivery methodology there is no official project manager role as the methodology strongly emphasizes on each team member to take full accountability their own work without relying to a project manager to tell the team what to do or what task to prioritize.

With the above understanding you might now start questioning what is exactly the role of a project manager in an Agile delivery. To be clear, a project manager is not the same as a scrum master, neither the role is supplementing each other. In short Agile does not recognize project manager role as part of the Scrum team (refer to my other posting on Scrum for a further detail).

In my personal experience, I ran a program manager role in a digital transformation project, involving more than one project, with each project has a number of streams. As some of the projects are touching the core system layer, in the program I ran there has been a mix between Agile and SDLC. In that case there was project manager and scrum master role leading different streams of work at the same time.

As the program manager, I oversee the entire timeline, budget, and scope of the multiple projects running in parallel. The program manager role was mainly to ensure alignment between one project to another in term of timeline and the systems being enhanced. In this type of program, a strong project management skill is highly required to be successful as a program manager. All key qualifications of a project manager, including communication, negotiation, and leadership are applicable to lead the program.

While in a pure agile delivery, a seasoned project manager normally transforms herself as a scrum master. It might not be an easy transition as the expectation of the two roles are completely different. While a project manager is expected to manage the team and lead the overall delivery of the project, a scrum master's role is more to ensure team collaboration and that every scrum ceremonies and artifact are run and delivered properly.

However, the characteristic of a project manager is entirely applicable in leading any delivery, including as a scrum master. As in any type of project, a strong leadership and management skill (people management, resource management, technical management) are considered key success factors, which should not be absence in any successful delivery.

Edwin