The Hybrid PM: Time to Learn a New Language

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   Scrum  

I haven’t seen the statistics, but anecdotally based on conversations I have had over the past couple of years, there is a trend for project managers to seek agile certifications. It has been suggested to me that a large reason for the growth in the Project Management Institute’s Agile Certified Professional (PMI-ACP) certification is because it was more accessible to already PMI-certified professionals than an alternative like Certified ScrumMaster (CSM).

Perhaps that’s true, perhaps it isn’t; but clearly, project managers are recognizing they have to develop their agile knowledge and skills to succeed in the modern project execution environment. So how can they do that? Is it as simple as getting an additional certification?

I guess there’s an inevitability in an article like this to hit the potentially contentious debate of project manager versus ScrumMaster, so let’s try and deal with those elements head on. First, I don’t think a project manager is the same as a ScrumMaster—they are different roles on different types of projects. I also don’t think organizations need to choose which of the two roles they are going to have—there is plenty of room for both if needed (and they may well be). Note that I am referring to differences in the role here; there is no reason why the two roles can’t be played by …

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