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Lori R Stone
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23
Senior PM Consultant - Ready for Anything!
08/06/20 at 8:43PM UTC
in
Women In Tech

Who Handles Conventional Project Manager Duties in Agile Development?

Traditional project managers usually take on a great deal of responsibility. They are responsible for managing scope, cost, quality, personnel, communication, risk, procurement and more. Agile project management often puts the traditional project manager in a difficult position. He or she is told, for example, to make scope/schedule trade-off decisions knowing that a product manager or customer might second-guess those decisions if the project goes poorly. Agile acknowledges this difficult position, and distributes the traditional project manager's responsibilities. What is agile about this new paradigm is that many of these duties, such as task assignment and day-to-day project decisions, revert back to the team, where they rightfully belong. Responsibility for scope and schedule trade-off goes to the product owner. Quality management becomes a responsibility shared among the team, a product owner and Scrum Master. Other traditional tasks are distributed as well among a team’s agile project management roles. Do you think this is the right way to manage in an Agile environment?

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Lisa Kincaid
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11
Exec Advisor, Enterprise Product Acceleration
08/07/20 at 7:14PM UTC
Hello Lori, I started out working as a Project Manager in the Infrastructure Tech field within a PMO. Now I lead a division of Software Engineers, Product Managers and UX Designers at a Fortune 5 company using the Agile XP Methodology. There is a huge difference between Waterfall and Agile/s (Barb listed several 'combinations' of agile paths). Personal experience, Waterfall takes extremely long to 'get to market' and is usually used for Infrastructure type PROJECTS--projects have an end date of delivery. There is a lot of unnecessary red-tape and as a project manager you are juggling lots of deliverables across multiple Lines of Business and Functional Teams. Speaking specifically on Agile XP, it is by far the best for Software Development. As a PRODUCT manager, YOU have a team of 5 (you, a pair of engineers who pair-program, a UX designer and the Business Product Manager or Product Owner) up to 9 (2 more pairs of engineers could be added, depending on the size of effort). Your team sits in a large room/space with you for 8 hours a day (no more 60-70 hr work weeks); meaning, the business is in the room with you--making strategic decisions together, no more scheduling and waiting for meetings to happen, no more emails asking qualifying questions, no more interoffice Instant Messaging. We all work together to deliver a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) every 2 weeks. No more waiting until after QA/UAT to deliver a possible outdated or incorrect product to the business or customer. As Tech & Innovative companies are realizing the enormous benefits of Agile (financial savings and Time to Market), many Project Managers/PMPs are becoming Scrum Certified and honing their skill set in that direction like I did. There will always be a need for both Waterfall and Agile, but the 2 should never mix; it's like oil and water, the methodology is completely different and you are only asking for trouble or a longer and possibly failed outcome. Personally, I will never (I know we shouldn't say never...but) take a position that uses Waterfall or some combination of Waterfall and Agile. I'm more effective in my day to day productivity, I have more time to coach and mentor, I'm efficient in my delivery and I feel I am making a positive impact for my customer, my division and my company. To answer your question...No. It sounds like you are in a hybrid environment; again, not a good combination for you (your sanity) or your customers/business partners. I know it's easier said than done, but do your homework, then speak to your leadership team about the best, most efficient way the company can deliver on its projects. Even if they don't take your advice, you have opened the door to your leadership noticing your interest in taking the company to a higher level. Every company wants employees they see as an asset.
Barb Hansen
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6.65k
Startup Product, Growth & Strategy
08/07/20 at 1:35AM UTC
I have worked in Product Management for many years. I have mostly worked with modified-agile development processes but never in an "Agile with a capital A" environment. Outside of agile, I have worked in Scrum, Modified Scrum, FrAgile, and Free-for-all-that-leaned-towards-Agile. I work mostly in startup land so my experience is in garage-based-teams up to about 150 people in the dev/product/program teams. In my teams, project managers are responsible (as I think you said above), for ensuring the schedule is met, project documentation (not requirements but reports), setting and managing meetings, managing budgets, alerting team to any issues and being a strong partner to the product owner. I have also worked in a larger organization where we had a PMO (Project Management Office), and those project managers were assigned to large projects. In those large projects (that cross multiple departments, multiple dev teams with multiple Agile processes and years to implement) the PMs acted as coordinators, reporters and mediators (same job as the smaller project PMs) just at a higher level. Did that answer help? :)

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