Do We Treat Agile Teams Differently?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Agile  

I was recently talking to a colleague about how the nature of project teams has changed over the last few years. We were discussing how PMs had been given more autonomy, how there was a recognition that tailoring approaches was important.

Then my colleague said, “Yeah, but that’s not happening with agile.” His argument was that while traditional project delivery teams were becoming more unique, with a lot more variety of experience from one team to the next, agile teams all provided the same experience.

His belief was that the combination of the scrum master enforcing the approach and the product owner managing the backlog that fed the team with work meant that all agile teams operated in pretty much the same manner. Every sprint across every team was “the same” in terms of method and approach—only the details of what was done varied.

He acknowledged that agile projects often had project managers, and that those PMs were looking to ensure that the initiative had the best chance of delivering the expected business benefits. But he felt that agile PMs had less freedom in how they operated because of the presence of product owners, and particularly scrum masters.

Is that an accurate picture?
I understand where he’s coming from. The nature of agile is that the two-week sprint cycle provides a consistent approach to the work …

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