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Gartner PPM & IT Governance Summit
May 20-22, 2013 | National Harbor, MD
From Project Manager to ScrumMaster
Andy Jordan PMP is the founder and president of Roffensian Consulting. Andy is a seasoned business professional with experience in many industries on two continents. After a career managing high profile, business critical projects for many organisations Andy moved into leadership of project management offices and built a reputation for building, rescuing and improving this key function. His approach of tailoring processes to the style and ability of the organisation, and focusing on the development of project staff rather than the short sighted approach of meeting project deliverables at all costs has repeatedly shown dramatic results.
As project managers we have been conditioned to understand the importance of process and methodology. Our entire careers are defined by process areas, input, outputs, tools and techniques. Process and structure is what we are all about. And then Scrum comes along…
When a PM is first exposed to Scrum, it can seem as though there is very little if any structure--the team simply organizes themselves and gets work done in relatively uncontrolled sprints. That’s not the case, and the PM does have an important role to play. However, that role is different than in a traditional project: They are the ScrumMaster, and that requires different (but related) skills.
ScrumMaster?
Okay, so Scrum does have some strange titles, but that doesn’t change the importance of the role. The ScrumMaster has a very important role to play:
- They act to remove obstacles from the Scrum team that may hinder their ability to complete the work
- They make sure that the team is undertaking their work in accordance with the rules and guiding principles of Scrum
- They coach and guide the team
That doesn’t actually sound all that much different from a project manager, does it? It might be a little simpler, but the concepts are inherently the same. Let’s take them one at a time.
The Scrum team has to focus on completing work in the sprint …
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