Does an agile team need a project manager?

Agile Governance Information Technology Organizational Project Management

Mirko Blüming Senior Project Manager| Statkraft Germany GmbH Düsseldorf, Nrw, Germany

Agile teams are characterized as self organizing, responsible for quality, customer focused. In Scrum, the most known agile method, there is no project manager role. So what's left to do for a project manager? I think his role shifts more to be a link between the team and the organization - what do you think?

Posted: Dec 1, 2018 1:32 PM

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Sergio Luis Conte Helping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based Organizations Buenos Aires, Argentina

Dec 03, 2018 6:26 PM

Replying to Robert Neil Wood

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Fascinating answers and bang-on! The key piece is not to confuse the role with the function. The role might or might not exist but many/all of the functions are likely to exist, it's just a matter of who's doing them in a given approach/method/framework.

In an org I was part of, they (tried to) implement Agile/Scrum within an overall traditional environment, so the PM role got sort-of redefined to be: all the stuff the scrum team isn't doing, old-style status reportiing, budget planning/management, vendor engagement, resource mgt, etc.

@Robert has put a great point here. Let me give an example of the reality in my actual work place. One of my duties is all about methods, strategy and governance. We have the same person assigned at the same time to more than one initiative where those initiatives are using predictive based approach and adaptive based approaches.I meant, the same person is working in waterfall based approach and Scrum based approach. That´s happen at the same time. The important thing is that person has clear the roles and its associated functions/procedures to perform the role.

Posted: Dec 4, 2018 4:48 AM

Anton Oosthuizen Senior Business Analyst / Project Manager| Self Employed Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa

Dec 03, 2018 5:40 PM

Replying to Mirko Blüming

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@Anton: The problem is that people will not go that deep to understand how the PM role is recovered - they look at how roles are called, and will conclude that PM's can be discarded.

Mirko, you might be right but keep in mind that it is primarily up to the PM to ensure they evolve into the role where their skills are needed. It is easy enough to discard the role based on the role definitions of any approach or framework but not so easy to discard the function. We might not necessarily want to 'recover' the PM role, we want to recover the function.

Posted: Dec 4, 2018 5:04 AM

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Does an agile team need a project manager?

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