The Agile Project Manager: To Facilitate, Serve and Protect

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile   Risk Management   Scrum  

Some agile teams build and maintain their project’s rhythm, happily developing the system. Sure, they may encounter issues--but they can manage those problems and they successfully release the product. No one works overtime, the product owner is happy and the users are happy with the system.

Then there are the other teams. I meet many agile team members who say, “We really need someone full time to help us. We can’t do the technical work and do all the other stuff we need to do for the organization. Maybe if everyone else was agile, we wouldn’t need someone--but we do right now.”

Those teams need agile project managers. Not a directing and controlling project manager, but a facilitative, serving and protective project manager. The agile project manager has several clear roles: to facilitate the team’s process, to serve by removing obstacles and managing risks, and protecting the team from disturbing outside influences.

Some of you are probably saying, “We don’t need a real project manager to protect the team’s process. We have a Scrum Master to do that.” Or I hear from an XP team that they don’t need any management--they are completely self-organizing.

If you are using Scrum, yes--a Scrum Master does protect the team’s process. But I see Scrum Masters who are supposed to do technical work…

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