How does a Project Manager add value to an Agile Scrum team?
written by gunther gerlach-2009
Definition: Agile project management is as radically different from traditional project management as agile processes are different from traditional methodologies. Rather than plan, instruct and direct, the agile project manager facilitates, coaches and leads.
Recently I came across of someone posting about the value of a PM in an Agile Scrum environment. It’s been a long time from most of the companies realized the important role of PMs But it looks like some Scrum process consultants, after run out of ideas to justify the PM’s role, they just wants to get rid off them… big mistake
Some Agile experts say that Agile Scrum teams are supposed to be self managing. That they are free to make decisions about deliverables and moving resources within the team and pretty much everything related with the project during development… The truth is NOT WAY!
Agile Scrum development teams are self managing in a restricted level from a project perspective and are, allowed making decision in a specific layer during the project life cycle.
A project is usually composed by many independent and moving parts, involving many on site and remote teams as part of a program, making the PM (Principal Point of contact) a key role during the project life. The PM’s work start way before the Agile Scrum Team acknowledge about the project existence, getting involved with requirement acceptance for the good performance of the platform (if the requirement or new feature has external service dependencies, may add latency to your platform and impact your performance and user experience), maintain and improve user experience and, ecosystem requirements for latter integration with existent services (are the requirements following basic software architecture rules like: interdependent, decupled, etc).
Preview to the introduction of the project to the teams and make it part of the portfolio (assigning resources) and whenever the above described tasks are done, some SDEs will be chosen by the PM from diverse teams to participate in few meeting to discuss integration design strategies, fix, limit and restrict requirements to what is realistic and accepted by this engineering team. Only when the fixed requirements are officially accepted by the PMO and resources are assigned to the project, the Agile Scrum Team acknowledge about of the existence of the project.
During the SDLC of a project, the active role of the PM is divided in three mayor categories:
Principal Point of Contact: The PM is the one who truly and ultimate knows all the moving parts of the project, from a technical and a business perspective. He/she is the one who will provide with insights to the PMO to make strategy decisions at a business level (closing and opening projects, reassigning resources, etc).
Communicator: Creating an appropriate communication and escalation plans, facilitating the design or building a common repository (web based) tools for the whole project, containing reports, files, versions, parameters, decisions, changes, responsible, project stage, blockers, alternatives, related systems performance and metrics, etc. In general, coordinate reports and inform to everyone involved. Even the deployment in test environments, integration and production should be added as part of the overall communication and report.
Management: The PM is the one who will keep track of the deliverables at both, mayor milestone and sprint backlog commitments by each team. Balancing and reassigning resources when is necessary, dealing with the stake holders and Product Owners in a daily bases, prioritizing activities in a general content (beyond the team frontiers), measuring productivity and performance, preventing blockers, planning contingences for disasters, anticipating, scoping, scheduling, and involving teams as they are needed, etc. If the PM’s role is also at a technical level, the PM involvement will expand beyond the deployment. Measuring performance metrics and other indicators.
Agile Scrum teams are allowed to make light impact decisions by their self with total autonomy only within their teams. Some of these decisions are:
Ø Determining when and who will be assigned to a specific task from the Backlog during the present Sprint.
Ø Move resources whiting the team to accomplish their commitments for the current sprint.
Ø Prioritize activities as the team better wishes.
Ø etc
