By Linky van der Merwe

Project Manager in transition

If you are a seasoned project management professional like me (20 years) who is transitioning into agile, you will find that this article aims to give answers when you’re trying to make sense of what it means to be an Agile Project Manager (PM).

We know that Agile is not a new concept. In 2001 it was made official through the publication of the Agile Manifesto although it had been around before then. It is just my experience lately that project managers, especially experienced ones, as well as new Project Management Professionals (PMP’s) are expected to understand Agile better and to know how to operate efficiently within an Agile context. 

That is why representing organisations, like the Project Management Institute (PMI), have included information on agile practices, alongside traditional approaches in the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) Guide– Sixth Edition, and partnered with Agile Alliance® to create the new Agile Practice Guide. The guide provides tools, situational guidelines and an understanding of the various agile approaches available to enable better results and is useful for more traditional project managers to adapt to a more agile approach.

Before talking about the Agile PM role specifically, I think it’s worthwhile to have a brief look at the trends that I believe, are impacting the project management profession currently. This is not meant to be a complete list, but rather a focus on those trends that make the transition, to become Agile project managers, necessary.

Project Management Trends (2019 research)

#1 Project Complexity

In the past few years we have seen an increasing complexity on projects which requires project managers to have the ability to simply interpret and explain complex business processes to project teams and stakeholders alike.

#2 Project thinking

There seems to be a shift where project thinking is integrated into all parts of the work processes.

#3 Design thinking

Development of design thinking as a new type of creative approach. This would be applicable for tasks like definition of requirements, solutions to atypical problems and so on.

#4 Distributed work teams

Due to globalization, more and more companies have distributed work teams due to the increase in the number of international teams in modern business. Often, a specialised stream of work, is outsourced to a vendor company who may supply resources from India and it will be a cheaper solution than to find internal resources with capacity or local resources whose specialized skills come at a higher cost.

#5 Shift from Waterfall to Agile approaches

We see an accelerated shift from Waterfall to Agile Project Management in larger organizations as the only way to deliver on benefits in increasingly dynamic and complex environments in order to learn and adapt quickly.

#5 Project Managers as all-rounders

There is a move for PM’s to be more all-rounders, requiring them to be flexible, strategic, focus on the dependencies within the project. At the same time there is more pressure from stakeholders for PM’s to be more creative to meet strategic objectives.

#6 Emotional Intelligence

The development of emotional intelligence as an important soft skill has become essential as part of the day to day through the project life cycle.  Read what it really means here.

#7 Cloud-based systems

There is a huge push to move projects to cloud-based systems which are accessible from any-where.

#8 Enhanced Reporting and data

We live in a world with expectations for enhanced reporting and data. Project stakeholders, like management, want views, templates and saved filters for easy access. Management and team members also want real-time information to stay informed and to help make decisions on a day-to-day basis.

Sources for PM trends:

Merehead

PMI Pulse of the Profession 2017

Invensis Learning – excerpts from group of experts

Clickup.com

Agile considerations

On projects with evolving requirements, high risk, or significant uncertainty, the scope is often not understood at the beginning of the project or it evolves during the project. 

Agile methods deliberately spend less time trying to define and agree on scope in the early stage of the project and spend more time establishing the process for its ongoing discovery and refinement.  With emerging requirements there is often a gap between the real business requirements and the business requirements that were originally stated.  Therefore, agile methods purposefully build and review prototypes and release versions in order to refine the requirements. As a result, scope is defined and redefined throughout the project.  In agile approaches, the requirements constitute the backlog.

The main difference between traditional and agile approaches with regards to the triple constraints, is best illustrated with the image below. On traditional projects the scope is normally fixed at the beginning of the project with either the resources/cost or time being more flexible or negotiable. On agile projects the resources (teams) and time (time-boxed iterations) are normally fixed, with the scope being flexible based on delivering the most valuable products first.

This is why we see in trustworthy sources, like the PMI Pulse of the Profession 2017 Report, that there are several principles and methods to be considered for an Agile approach. They include:

• Focus of the team of specialists on the needs and objectives of the company’s customers; 
• Simplification of processes and organizational structure;
• Division of the workflow into short cycles with specific tasks; 
• Focus on feedback and active use of its results;
• Increase the authority of members of the work team;
• Introduction of a humanistic approach 

The Agile Project Manager in the Enterprise context

With a view of the current trends impacting the Project Management profession as well as the Agile considerations, where does it leave professional Project Managers?

Here, I’d like to quote Alistair Cockburn, a signatory of the Agile Manifesto 2001, when he was asked at a conference in 2015 whether organisations should get rid of project managers and replace them with scrum masters, his response was,

“If organisations think that agile is a way of getting rid of project managers, they’re wrong. We need good people more than ever.”

Alistair Cockburn

Although the quote is 4 years old, it still rings true.

In agile it’s about working together more effectively to deliver value more quickly to the customer. The Manifesto called on organisations to “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.” 

According to Collin D Ellis, a leadership and culture expert, organisations need to act as if people are the most important. He states:

“do this by regularly displaying behaviours such as empathy, respect, trust, courage, generosity and honesty. It means keeping promises and making sure people are recognised for their efforts. It’s about having a working environment that is diverse and inclusive by design and where people know that they are empowered as soon as they walk through the door to be able to act without fear”.

Collin D Ellis

Where do project managers fit in?

In the image below, you will see a framework for Agile (mostly Scrum) as it may typically look like in an enterprise environment.  

It constitutes of three circles. The inner circle represents one (or more) Scrum teams with the cross functional dedicated team members fulfilling the three main roles, a Product Owner, a Scrum Master and the Development team who may consist of a Business Analyst, Developer(s) and Tester.

The second circle represents roles with people who are not necessarily dedicated to one team only, but who could support multiple scrum teams. They represent Architects (solution -, platform -, business -), Business Owner and Subject Matter Experts (SME), Release Manager, Project support (administrator), Project Manager and Agile Coach (optional).

The third circle will consist of a Business Sponsor and members of the Steering Committee, the Project Office (PMO), Change Management, Training, Enterprise Architecture and Program Management.

As you can see, the Agile Project Manager is part of the second and third circle and acts as the connection between the two. Where the Scrum Master is inward looking and responsible to support the team and to help remove impediments, the project manager is outward looking, more like a coordinator often overseeing multiple scrum teams on a project with duties including allocating and tracking budget, communicating with external stakeholders, contractors and vendors, maintaining a risk register and helping to manage interdependencies with other projects and teams.

The Role of the Agile Project Manager

According to the PMI PMBOK and Agile Practice Guide (2017), the role of the project manager in an agile project is somewhat of an unknown, because many agile frameworks and approaches do not address the role of the project manager. 

Some agile practitioners think the role of a PM is not needed, due to self-organizing teams taking on the former responsibilities of the project manager.  However, pragmatic agile practitioners and organizations realize that PM’s can add significant value in many situations. 

The key difference is that their roles and responsibilities look somewhat different.  The traditional role of a project manager as planner, organizer, and controller disappears, and the role of a facilitator or coach who effectively manages the collaborative efforts of team members without stifling their creativity takes its place (Highsmith, 2003). The focus is on people, rather than on process.

All project managers will not automatically move into the Scrum Master role, or alternatively into the Product Owner role. An Agile project manager must still monitor that corporate policies and project governance is followed. Mike Cohn (Mountain Goat Software, 2019) explains it well when he says that Scrum Master’s authority extends only to the process. The Scrum Master is an expert on the process, and on using it to get a team to perform to its highest level. But, a Scrum Master does not have many of the traditional responsibilities – scope, cost, personnel, risk management – that a project manager does. Duties, such as task assignment and daily project decisions revert back to the team.  Responsibility for scope and schedule tradeoff goes to the product owner. Quality management becomes a responsibility shared among the team, a product owner and Scrum Master.

What Agile Project Managers need to do

Different Mindset

You will need a different mindset, considering the agile principles and values. There are new tools and techniques to understand and apply on agile projects for example Adaptive Planning techniques. 

Servant Leader

The next thing to change is to let go of a command and control approach and being the centre of coordination. You will need to move into the Servant Leadership space in order to focus on people rather than process.

Read my article on Servant Leadership here.

Consultant and Coach

On a team level, the agile project manager can play a consultative role to put in place the appropriate people, process, and tools, to improve team efficiency and effectiveness.  In addition you can be coaching members of the team as needed to optimise the project team’s performance. 

Facilitator

Do encourage the distribution of your responsibility to the team: to those who have the knowledge to get work done. The team will be accountable as a whole for what needs to be delivered. For this to work well, you need to build a collaborative decision-making environment as a facilitator and a coach to empower the team to make decisions and to be high-performing. 

Stakeholder engagement

The agile project manager works with the customer to layout a common set of understandings from which emergence, adaptation and collaboration can occur. The agile project manager lays out a vision and then nurtures the project team to do the best possible to achieve the plan, as per Mike Cohn.

Manage interdependencies

Another important responsibility on complex Agile projects will remain the management of project intra- as well as interdependencies, with other projects. To do this well, stakeholder engagement is still essential.

Read more about adaptive planning skills in this article: “Are you on a time-critical project?“

Let me know in the comments what your views are on the topic of Agile project management.

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