Role of a Agile Project Manager

How is it different?

Agile PM

Traditional Project Management manages the known, Agile Project Management manages the unknown

There are distinctly different ways how you manage the unknown versus the known

There are distinctly different people and styles that are more suited to managing the unknown versus the known

Traditional PM tendencies

Detail Oriented

Manages the details

Manages the Plan

Doesn’t prefer change

Guardian Temperament

Agile PM tendencies

Encourages Change

Comfortable with Ambiguity

Comfortable with Delegation, Trust

Manages Value

Idealist Temperament

Idealist

These are big picture people who lead followers to pursue great dreams. They thrive on people issues and gravitate toward the soft skills: conflict resolution, negotiation, team building, facilitating.

Diplomacy and strategy are their strong suits

Guardian

People with this temperament like to play by a set of rules. These are the stabilizers in the organization, working to keep the boat on an even keel.

Meeting budgets and deadlines and following the plan are important to Guardians.

The Difference

In waterfall projects you focus on managing people and tasks, in Agile projects you focus on leading the process

Facilitate decision making versus making the decisions

Deliverable differencesTraditional Agile

Work Breakdown Structure Priorized Backlog

Weekly Status Reports Daily Stand ups

Project Plan Iteration Plan

MS Project Stickies

Problem Solver Problem Solver Assistant

Text Reports Visual Boards

7 Key TraitsCross Functional

Relationship Builder

Encourages Innovation

Comfortable with ambiguity

Facilitator

Prefers to collaborate

Provide visibility, not status

Cross Functional

Ideally an Agile PM will also play other roles on the project as well

Analyst

Developer

Tester

Relationship Builder

On a Traditional Project, the Analysts usually own the relationship with the business

On an Agile Project, the Analysts still have a strong relationship, but the Agile PM needs to also build a strong relationship to allow them to help to promote value

To do this they need to understand the solution

Encourages Innovation

As an Agile Team member and leader, the Project Manager need to encourage the team to innovate

This may cause more change, but also more value

Comfortable with Ambiguity

The Agile PM must be comfortable with ambiguity and vagueness

The Agile PM must be comfortable with not having a detailed plan or solution up front

Facilitator

The Agile Project Manager does not have a position of authority

As a consequence, they must excel at facilitating decisions with the client and between team mates

Prefers to Collaborate

An Agile PM, like all Agile team members, must prefer to collaborate.

Even when this collaboration is not required. This is done because the PM believes that better solutions will arise.

Provides Visibility, not status

Instead of preparing status reports to communicate status, the Agile PM creates an environments that provides total visibility to the status of the project for all to see

Kanban Boards, Visual Charts, User Story Maps

SummaryAn Agile Project Manager is a different role and set of skills that a traditional PM

Usually it helps if the Agile PM has a base competency in another skill set on the project as well

Many of the traditional PM characteristics are still required, but these Agile characteristics are important to have in addition

Questions ?