Ben Linders penned a great article for InfoQ, he writes: At the Agile Tour London 2015 Graham Dick gave a talk about the project manager as a positive agent for change. InfoQ interviewed him about how agile impacts the role of project managers, if there is still a need for project managers when organizations transition to agile, how to deal with project managers that oppose to agile, applying agile principles to project management, what self-organized teams expect from project managers, how project managers can be a positive agent for change, what to do to make collaboration work in agile, and any advice that he wants to give to project managers when their organization adopts agile.
Graham Dick has been involved with Agile since before it was called Agile. A software engineer in a small team in a obscure corner of a large mobile phone company Graham came across the Agile principles mostly by accident and being in the right place at the right time – resulting in the feeling we could tackle any problem – heady stuff! Moving on he spent many years helping organisations get Agile.
InfoQ: Can you share some experiences on how agile impacts the role of project managers?
Graham Dick: Agile is a big impact on the project manager’s role. What’s happening is that with agile done well the team ‘step up’ and start to do quite a lot of the “work” that PM’s in a traditional organisation spend their time doing. However to be fair I think that a lot of the responsibility delegation that happens under agile has happened in the past when mature project managers were working as they appreciated they did not have a monopoly on experience and knowledge and if they were smart they engaged heavily with their team in a facilitative manner to collaboratively work through a lot of these activities.
So some examples are identifying and managing risk where now an effective agile team will just brainstorm and track these themselves utilising the power of agile to identify which stories when implemented will mitigate which risks – then aggressively targeting them to take risk out of their project.
Another area of change is the work breakdown structure beloved of traditional methods – particularly when developed in excruciating detail up-front. Agile just changes this for the PM, instead she lets her team free within the constraints of agile and watches as they collaborate with their product owner (PO) to allocate stories to iterations and then use their experience to identify what tasks need doing to get the story to Done. So overtime if we were to track the task boards each iteration we would come up with something equivalent to the old full blown WBS. Now instead of driving this activity out up front the PM just needs to ensure that his team are working agile well! Another interesting one is issue resolution. Traditionally the PM took ultimate accountability for project delivery and therefore command and controlled the team to ensure delivery to budget, schedule, scope. Now what happens with agile is that the team make themselves jointly accountable to each other every iteration for delivering the iteration scope to Done. The product owner is accountable to the customer to ensure that sufficiently valuable features are delivered to address the business need. Given these two accountabilities the PM no longer needs to obsess about tracking issues, unless of course their resolution is outside the span of resolution of the team or PO. In which case there are impediments to delivery and the PM can chase their resolution. Other responsibilities like ‘incorporating change’, ‘assigning tasks’, ‘identifying training needs’ become team responsibilities and are addressed as a matter of course with agile done well. So to sum up, agile done well takes a number or responsibilities away from the PM, however this should be seen as an opportunity and not as a threat as it frees the PM up to provide much needed focus to managing outwards to wider stakeholders and other groups within the organisation and also within partner delivery organisations.
SNIP, the Ben Linders article continues @ InfoQ, click here to continue reading…
