Stelian ROMANProject Manager| MicroSafetyCarlingford, New South Wales, Australia
Many Project Managers are now performing the Scrum Master role in addition to the 'traditional' PM responsibilities.
What is the percentage (time/effort) that a PM can allocate to Scrum?
What is the size or the type of the of the project that will require 100% PM duties? Saving Changes...
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Wade HarshmanScrum Master| GDITIndianapolis, In, United States
The answer seems very dependent on your project and your organization. In Scrum, there is no project manager. Team leadership is self-emergent, and should not require a project manager. The scrum master is there to help the team with the scrum framework, so my overly simple answer to the first question is that if you're a scrum master, you should be dedicating all of your time to your team until they no longer need you.
I realize, however, that many organizations modify the scrum framework. There are a good deal of teams that have project managers, especially on large projects. If you have to fill both the project manager and the scrum master role, you need to find a way to demarcate those positions. If your organization sees you as the project manager, it will be hard to become an effective scrum master. If you can accomplish that, the question of time is slightly less important. You simply need to be the scrum master whenever the team needs one. That will probably require a great deal of time at the beginning, when the team is learning the scrum framework, but should require less time as the team matures.
As a project manager, you'll also need to work closely with the product owner, or you'll find yourself duplicating each others' work. As the team and the product owner gain more confidence, you may find that your role as a project manager is not as important, either. If the project is so large or complex that you need to spend most of your time as a project manager, then someone else should definitely fill the scrum master role so that it gets the attention it deserves. Saving Changes...
An SM would normally facilitate all the ceremonies across the pods they are supporting so defining the time spent on those will give you an idea of the minimal commitment. Then you need to add in time spent team building within pods, resolving and escalating impediments and so on.
With my current client, they have both PMs and SMs on projects - the PMs focus on orchestration between pods, stakeholder management, and other activities outside of individual pod work whereas the SMs will support up to 3 pods.
Definitely good practices or emerging practices help and adopt agile practices will help more in one environment than in another depending on the project, do not forget that a project is a temporary effort and whose result is unique.
I believe that a "traditional" and "Agile" hybrid environment allows you to make the most of both. That percentage ? will depend on the project, is everything very well defined from the beginning? Are there a lot of uncertainty?
