Project manager vs scrum master - Difference? Roles? Abilities? Background?

The Project Manager and Scrum Master roles are not related. Organizations make a big mistake when they presume that one equates to the other.

Scrum is a framework for addressing complex problems and delivering products. The Scrum Master is, literally, the master of this framework who can mentor and facilitate for the team. Ideally, a scrum master works herself/himself out of a job as the team matures.

I don't have to tell you what a PM is, you already know that.

For anyone who is curious, I'd recommend downloading the Scrum Guide. It's online and it's only 17 pages long. If you want to transition to a Scrum framework, you should pay special attention to the Product Owner role. A PO is not a PM either (there is no PM role in Scrum, either in name or in practice), but you will probably find it easier to relate to the PO responsibilities rather than the SM.

As Wade already pointed out: read the scrum guide. You can find it here: http://www.scrumguides.org/index.html It is only 17 pages, so anyone should be able to read the complete scrum guide.

It is important to understand the mindset of Agile and Scrum. If you only take the most visible meetings and documents of Scrum without the mindset you will not get real Scrum and you will not get the benefits of Scrum.

Part of what a good Project Manager does is to protect the team from organisational politics and from disturbances. A good Project Manager also invest in developing the skills and competence of the team and the individuals. These tasks will mostly be done by the Scrum Master in a Scrum process.

Part of what a good Project Manager does is to interact with stakeholders to prioritise the correct features in the product created by the project. This is (mostly) done by the Scrum Product Owner.

Part of what a traditional PMI Project Manager does is monitoring and controlling the progress and distributing tasks to project team members. This is done by the Scrum Team (not by a manager) in Scrum.

This discussion is a very interesting one. From my point of view there is no “one-fits all” approach, especially for projects within my day-to-day focus: SAP Implementations.

In SAP implementations you have very adaptive areas, on the other side of the coin there are also area’s that a very predictive such as preparation and transformation for production. Looking at the SAP Activate Methodology, I understand that also SAP itself does see the need for hybrid project methodology approach where agility with scrum master, product owner etc. plays a vital role in the requirements analysis and development especially of differentiating processes that are not fully covered via the “traditional standard common processes”. This applies especially for the workplace digitization challenges within such projects.

In a nutshell, I do not see that scrum master and “traditional PM” do necessarily contradict itself in a project. From my point of view it depends on the type of projects and what fits best to the project success. Certainly, there are product and software projects outside there, where the pure “clean” scrum approach makes sense and is the most effective one, but there are also others where a hybrid approach is applicable.

I am also looking forward to read in the announced Agile Practice Guide what PMI’s standpoint is on such discussions.