#9: Why are there no project managers in Scrum?

Hi,

It’s Thursday once more, and this week I’m both enjoying a wonderful group on a Certified ScrumMaster course as well as the superb weather that appeared this week - hopefully it’s not all of the sun we see this year.

Very often, particularly on courses like CSM, the question comes up about the role of project managers in the Agile world. A more maligned group of people I’m not sure there are in our arena, and this week I want to share a different perspective on project management and project managers.

One Insight I’ve Had

In the?#agile?community, project managers often get a lot of bad publicity.

In my opinion, that isn’t fair. They are talented, intelligent people who are dedicated to helping their teams and organisations deliver projects within specification, budget and agreed deadlines.

No easy task.

It takes a great deal of skill, effort and dedication to achieve these outcomes and the reason they fail, more often than not, is because they work in volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environments.

Environments where traditional, waterfall-style project management is not designed to thrive or succeed. Environments where you simply cannot know the answer - or all the variables - upfront because those problems have yet to be solved, those variables have yet to be discovered, and those products have yet to be created.

I admire the tenacity and resilience of project managers who are working in complex environments because even though the system has set them up for failure, they continue to persevere and give of their best, regardless of how challenging and demoralising their working environment may be.

When we look at the skills that project managers have developed throughout their career, we see how incredibly valuable those skills are in applications such as a product owner, scrum master or agile leader.

We recognise how invaluable their relationship-building capabilities are and how skilled they have become at working with people across the organisation to help them achieve their project delivery goals and objectives.

So, given how valuable these individuals are, and given how deeply skilled they are, how come there are no project managers in Scrum?

Why doesn’t the #agile community embrace project managers and integrate their knowledge, skills and capabilities into #agileframeworks?

The truth is, there simply isn’t a need for project managers in a #scrum environment and I’ve created a short video to explain why.

One Quote

“In an environment where all the variables are known, project management works well. In an environment where you have built the solution many times before and have a fair idea of who needs to do what and how long it will take them to complete that work, project management works well too.

It simply doesn’t work in a product development environment or any complex environment where the variables are unknown. If you are creating the solution for the first time or solving the problem for the first time, there simply cannot be any step-by-step guide to getting it done.

Therefore, the entire underpinning of a project management role within a product development environment is irrelevant and unhelpful.” –?John McFadyen

Watch the full video ‘Why is there no project manager in Scrum?’

A Question for You

Do you work with a project manager in a scrum environment? What are your thoughts?

And an Offer

For a while, I've been thinking about how to give back more to the community and one of the ideas that have stood out is to create spaces where we can get deeper answers to the questions the books and classes don't cover.

The first in the series will be about Sprint Planning on 23rd May at 12:30 BST.

I'm trying out Slido to collect questions beforehand, if you want to gain some insight - or at least my opinion - on anything relating to Sprint Planning, feel free to add a question?here.

Any questions not covered as part of the webinar will be recorded separately and shared with those who submit them.

If this is of value to you then head over to?Agile Centre's community page?and sign-up.