Agilists and Project Managers: Examining Their Common Misconceptions

On December 31, 2024 Project Management Institute (PMI) acquired Agile Alliance (AA). As you’d expect this created a lot of buzz online, most of which was positive. This was great to see. I’ve jumped into a few discussions, mostly to counteract misconceptions, but for the most part have chosen to watch how the conversations unfolded. A common challenge that I’ve seen are the misconceptions that members of each community have about the other community, but also misconceptions that they have about themselves. We need to recognize that these misconceptions exist if we’re to learn from one another and grow together. That is the focus of this article.

?Regarding the picture, I’ve been a huge Planet of the Apes fan all my life and I’ve been waiting for the perfect opportunity to use it for years. It captures a fundamental reason why this acquisition is important – we need each other if we want to thrive.

Why You Should Listen to Me

You likely know me as the person behind the Agile Modeling and Agile Data methods, or the co-creator with Mark Lines of PMI’s Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit.? I’ve done other work in the agile space over the years, but those are the highlights. You may also know that PMI acquired DA in 2019 and that Mark and I were both Vice Presidents at PMI for three years following that acquisition. Long before PMI, we recognized that project management had its place in agile, that agile had its place in project management, and we did what we can to teach people how that worked in practice. While at PMI we did what we could to help bridge the two communities, often addressing many of the misconceptions I’m about to describe here. The lesson that we learned in doing this is that it’s hard work to bring people together, that we need to choose to listen to each other and to learn from one another. This requires ongoing, long-term action.

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Our Context

To be clear, right now both "communities" are struggling. To move forward together, we must recognize:

1. We have shared threats. VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, change, and ambiguity) has been kicking our collective behinds for years now. Worse yet, we all face workplace changes motivated by artificial intelligence (AI), which frankly just dials up all four aspects of VUCA. In parallel we also get to “enjoy” societal challenges resulting from turbulent politics, climate change, and the impact of social media.
2. We have overlapping communities. While it’s easy to talk about PMs and agilists being two separate groups, the fact is that we’ve had people with feet in both communities for years. While I’m sure this has been frustrating for them at times, I’m also sure it’s been advantageous for them too. My hope is that these people will continue to act as bridges between the two communities as they have before. Thank you for your service.
3. The Agile Community Shat the Bed. The agile community has been brought low the past two years by its mostly self-inflicted problems. These problems included but aren’t limited to a focus on meaningless certifications over education, on frameworks over improvement, on fluff over stuff, on purity over agility, and on fads over grounded practices. It’s an uncomfortable observation, but the primary reason why AA chose to be acquired by PMI is because they were in a financial death spiral resulting from the end of the agile gold rush. Yes, there are many positive reasons supporting the acquisition, but these reasons existed for many years but were insufficient to motivate an acquisition or merger until now. Gotta call it as I see it.
4. Project managers (generally) aren’t perceived as adding value. Project managers have been struggling to define what value they bring to the table. Yes, it’s important to coordinate groups of people. Yes, it’s been great to have someone do the reporting paperwork nobody else wanted to do, but that busywork is being automated away now. Yes, there is far more to project management than these things, but does leadership notice any of that? Therein lies the rub. Recently PMI has made progress in defining project management in terms of delivering value, reflecting a more agile and frankly more mature way of thinking. They have a long, and important, journey ahead of them.
5. Our communities aren’t. Throughout this article I use the terms “PM community” and “agile community.” The challenge is that these communities certainly aren’t homogenous and arguably aren’t even communities. The “PM community” is effectively a collection of collaborating tribes working in different contextual categories whereas the “agile community” is a collection of warring tribes arguing about pretty much everything. The idea that there are PM and agile communities, and that they’re represented by PMI and AA respectfully, are potential misconceptions that I discuss in the leadership section. For now I’m going to talk in terms of communities. ?

My hope, and the hope of many, is that we will learn from each other and grow together. To do that, we need to overcome commonly held misconceptions we have about both about ourselves and about “the other team.”

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Regarding Misconceptions

The original Planet of the Apes (POTA) movie ends with Taylor discovering that he has crash landed on Earth. Throughout the movie there had been growing evidence pointing towards that conclusion, but he only accepted the truth once he saw the remains of the Statue of Liberty with his own eyes. Until this point Taylor had operated under the misconception that he had landed on another planet. The point is that misconceptions are hard to overcome.

This article examines three set of common misconceptions: those held by many agilists, those held by many project managers, and those held by many leaders. Note how I said many, not all. I’m sharing generalizations, based on my observations of working with, and within, all three communities. They have all been reinforced by the discussions that I’ve seen recently on LinkedIn and other social media platforms. You yourself may hold none of these misconceptions – yeah, let’s go with that – but you likely have seen all of these exhibited at some point by others. In short, these misconceptions are common but not universal. In all cases they represent head winds that reduce our ability to work together more effectively.

Common Misconceptions Held by Agilists

The agile movement, which began in 2001, was in many ways an uprising of developers against the poor project management practices of the time. While this wasn’t the violent uprising depicted in the POTA franchise, many agilists saw themselves as the “good guys” bringing freedom to the downtrodden developer masses.? Whatever.? The problem was that it reinforced an “us vs. them” mentality within the agile community that still pervades today.

?History lesson over. Now let’s explore what in my experience are common misconceptions held by many agilists:

1. Project managers are the enemy. First, thank you for sharing your prejudices. Second, one thing that we learned at Disciplined Agile, Inc. was that middle management, including project managers, were key to any transformation success.? They’re the people that make things happen. Or they’re the people who make things not happen when they’re not on your side. ?
2. Project managers aren’t agile. Bullshit, complete and utter bullshit. Feel free to quote me on that.? Hunt up old copies of the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBoK) guide and you’ll find agile, agileish, and lean techniques in them. PMBoK Guide 6th Edition (2017) clearly included agile techniques, and the 7th Edition (2021) was restructured to explicitly provide greater support for agile ways of working (WoW) and ways of thinking (WoT). Granted, as I point out in the next section, some project managers still believe that they can’t benefit from agile. Instead of being distracted by them, you’re better advised to help them to better understand the opportunity presented by agile.
3. It’s just about software. Although many people still insist that agile is only for software development, it is spectacularly easy to observe that many people have successfully applied agile outside of the software realm.? Not only is it possible, as I argue in The Future of Agile Isn’t Shit I believe that more and more people will see that it’s possible to leverage agile WoW and WoT beyond software.
4. Agile is always better. No, it isn’t. Sometimes an agile technique is the best option for the situation that you face, sometimes a lean technique is, and sometimes (egads!) a traditional technique is.? Context counts. Effective practitioners have a wide range of techniques in their intellectual toolkit and the experience and knowledge to take a fit-for-purpose approach.
5. Agilists are good at change. I’ll let the agile transformation success rate speak for itself. Some agilists were good at change, typically those who didn’t tie themselves to a specific agile framework (SAFe and Scrum coaches, I’m looking at you). Better yet, usually, were the ones that chose to gain a background in change management. Once the benefits of PMI membership are extended to existing AA members, I suggest that you take a look at the change management materials offered by PMI and their Brightline.org division.
6. Agilists are good at changing. Not really, which is one of the reasons why the agile gold rush is over.? Granted, we were incredibly good about preaching about change.
7. It’s really about agility. It’s not about being agile and it never was. Nobody ever gave you a little gold star, or even a pat on the head, for being agile.? Nobody cared. Similarly, it isn’t about agility either, nor business agility, nor enterprise agility (my preferred term because it is more inclusive). Nobody really cares about that either. What they do care about are results – they want you to add real, visible value (see the article How Agilists Can Move Forward After Shatting the Bed).? Get the job done however you need to. When you choose to observe how you actually get the job done you will invariably discover that you are following a hybrid WoW. Nobody cares about that either.? To put it in agile rhetoric, our leadership values “results over agility”.
8. Agilists are welcome at the executive table. Rarely. A few years ago, I was at an executive education event. In the evening there was the usual opportunity to mingle with others, which is when the valuable discussions occur. Being seen as “the agile guy” of the group I was often approached by people seeking insight into how to get their agile transformations back on track (sigh). One person I chatted with was a CIO at a large organization, and she shared this anecdote with me: “My 6-year-old often listens in to my husband and I talking and wants to get involved in the conversation. She’ll have what she believes to be a really good idea, and she’ll have a very strong opinion about it. Invariably the idea, although cute, isn’t remotely realistic. We thank her for her idea and she wanders off to focus on something else. It’s the exact same experience at work talking with our agile coaches.” ?The people with a seat at the executive table execute strategic initiatives and are typically responsible for the success of a mission-critical portion of the organization. If you want a seat at this table you need to go beyond the tactical, team-focused agile WoT and take on a true leadership position rather than simply blathering on about servant leadership.

It is interesting to note that the common misconceptions of agilists aren’t solely focused on project management, but rather on agile itself. I see a similar, mirror issue withing the PM community.?

Common Misconceptions Held by Project Managers

In the original Planet of the Apes movies Dr. Zaius was the minister of science and chief defender of the faith. He believed in, and more importantly enforced, the Lawgiver’s lore. When doctors Zira and Cornelius presented him with new ways of thinking (WoT), including the evidence of Taylor, a talking human, he not only held to his faith he actively fought to suppress this new paradigm. In many ways this was the reaction of the project management community to agile, certainly in the early days and even for some hold outs still. Let’s explore what I find to be common misconceptions held by project managers:

1. Agile doesn’t apply to me.? Bullshit, complete and utter bullshit.? Once again, feel free to quote me on this. The reality is that you can always improve your WoW and very often a viable improvement is to apply an agile or lean technique. Will you be completely, 100% agile? No, because that wouldn’t make sense. Will you blindly follow an agile framework such as Scrum or SAFe as some of the agile purists would have you believe? No, because that would be a spectacularly bad idea.
2. People are resources.? No! No! No! To put this in perspective, staff like to be referred to as resources just as much as project managers enjoy being referred to as useless overhead. Agilists find this sort of language particularly repugnant – if we’re to work together effectively we need to adopt respectful language.
3. It’s just about projects. This is also clearly not true, never has been, and never will be. Yes, projects are an important way to organize people to achieve a specific goal. There are other ways to organize people, however, such as long-standing product or services teams. Don’t believe me? Consider project management offices (PMOs).? PMOs are invariably organized as a long-standing services team, not as a project. More importantly, in software development, particularly where agile and lean have become the norm, there has been a clear abandonment of projects in favor of product-based approaches. They still need management, just not the project management flavor of it.
4. Projects add value. This is rarely the case in practice, regardless of any marketing rhetoric to the contrary. Projects, or more accurately project teams, produce potential value assuming they’re successful. As PMI’s value stream lifecycle adroitly points out, potential value is produced by the “project team” and the value is only realized once the solution – product(s) or service(s) – is operational. Furthermore, that value is determined by the customer, not by your team. Declaring “earned value” because you’ve performed some work, or because you’ve delivered something as the result of your project efforts, is at best meaningless nonsense and at worst a blatant lie. Value is earned in practice through usage of your product(s) or service(s) by your customers, and that occurs after the project team has delivered.
5. Project managers are welcome at the executive table. In most organizations project managers are seen as people who get things done, and that’s pretty good. Project manager is a tactical position, not a strategic one. Being a PMO leader, or better yet a value management office (VMO) leader, is potentially a strategic position if you’re doing the job right and perceived to be doing so. If you want a seat at the executive table, as with agilists you must be strategically focused, not tactically focused. The implication is that at best being a project manager is merely a stepping stone on your path to the executive suite.

Common Misconceptions Held by Our Leadership

This is very likely one of the funniest scenes in any of the Planet of the Apes movies. During the inquiry trial into the existence of Taylor, the tribunal judges sat in the classic “monkey no see, monkey no hear, monkey no speak” positions for a brief moment. The evidence being presented to them didn’t align with their belief system and each of them struggled with that. In the coming months, as this merger progresses, I suspect that the people leading this valiant effort will struggle with several misconceptions:

1. The AA represents the “agile community”.? Ouchie. Although AA got its start representing and promoting agile, it eventually evolved into an event organization. The “agile community” is a fractured bunch of warring tribes. Although there is a very large number of agilists worldwide, the AA membership is quite small in practice, with many members having been gifted membership because they attended an AA event within the last year. In practice the AA has very little influence over agilists nor the agile community. For individuals, any sort of community exists online in public forums and in face-to-face events.
2. The PMI represents the “PM community”.? Ouchie again. PMI certainly has influence over its membership through the administration of their various certifications and several ISO-recognized standards. Where the agile community is a group of warring tribes, the PM community is more like several tribes of people who don’t quite realize that they face different contexts (the classic example are PMs with a background in physical construction claiming that the WoW is applicable to managing a software team). For individuals, most of their community is represented in their local chapters and enhanced through PMI-organized events.
3. The communities want to merge. The communities will merge not because PMI has acquired AA but because individual members see the benefit of doing so. Apes together strong. For PMI to pick up net new membership from the agile community they must offer content, certification, and services that are of interest to agilists.?“Look at all this really cool project management stuff you get now” isn’t going to motivate agilists to start paying for PMI membership once their AA membership runs out. Luckily, with the acquisition PMI picked up access to some great intellectual property (IP) via AA that they will hopefully leverage and evolve for the benefit of all members. Having said that, the copyright for most of the IP at the AA site is owned by the content producers themselves, not AA. Details, details.
4. Achieving the potential synergy will be easy. I believe the potential is there, but as you saw above there are many challenges to overcome. It’s still early days and there’s a lot of wishful thinking, but once PMI and AA get into the thick of things I suspect they’ll need ongoing change management and execution to pull this off. This will be a multi-year, ongoing effort, not a short-term project.
5. The communities will be able to work together effectively. The fundamental strength of PMI is its chapters, in effect PMI is running a federated community model. The AA also supports agile groups around the world, but it’s orders of magnitute less structured in comparison. The point is that not only are there significant cultural challenges to overcome but also significant organization design challenges. The way that PMI chapters and agile practitioner groups choose to collaborate may prove to be the deciding factor for the success of this endeavor, not how well the parent organizations get along.

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Working Together is a Choice

At the end of the original movie Taylor and Zira have become good friends, and as Taylor is about to ride away into the sunset he asks Zira if he could kiss her goodbye. Zira says yes, even though he’s so darn ugly. The point is that these two very different people, each of whom initially saw the other as inferior, eventually learned to respect each other and work together effectively. I hope the same thing happens for the project management and agile communities. To do so will require them to overcome several significant headwinds:

1. Years of misconceptions. See above, and those aren’t the only ones.
2. Years of mutual animosity. There, I said it. Someone had to. This is a serious problem that needs to be overcome, and it’s going to require a long-term effort in multiple channels. These channels include, but are not limited to: online discussion forums; events such as Agile India, Agile 2025, and PMI Global Summit; and chapters/user groups.
3. Change is always hard. This is going to be a big change for both groups. This will require fundamental change management to pull off, and I hope that PMI and AA choose to eat their own cooking in this regard.
4. Acquisitions are brutal. Acquisitions, although often declared to be successful by the people behind them, usually fail in practice. Don’t believe me? A recent study of 40,000 mergers and acquisitions (M&As) deals over forty years found that 70-75% failed. The good news is that 25-30% of acquisitions succeed, so there is hope. I highly suggest that the people involved with this acquisition read this book because it works through critical success factors.

To conclude, my sincere hope is for this acquisition to work out. It’s going to require hard work but we’re up to the task, and the first step is to choose to succeed. ?Apes together strong.

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More About Me

I have other writings about both agile WoW and project management at my Agile Data, Agile Modeling, Ambysoft, and Scott Ambler sites.? In my consulting practice I focus on helping teams and organizations to improve their ways of working (WoW) and ways of thinking (WoT), particularly around data activities that are critical for AI/ML development. I also give presentations at conferences, to user groups, and to teams within organizations about a range of topics.

Acknowledgements

I wanted to thank Nick Argall , Ray Arell , Mike Griffiths , and Jim Highsmith for their feedback that went into improving this article. More to come.