Role of an agile pm
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Transcript of Role of an agile pm
©2008 Protegra Inc. All rights reserved.
Agile and the Project Manager
Where is my WBS? Who un-installed Microsoft Project?
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Learning Outcomes
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1. Describe some differences between
Traditional & Agile PMs
2. Describe differences between the PM
deliverables
3. 7 Traits for an Agile PM
4. And one more thing….
Agile PM
Traditional Project Management manages the known,
Agile Project Management manages the unknown
There are distinctly different ways how you manage the unknown versus the known
There are distinctly different people and styles that are
more suited to managing the unknown versus the known
Traditional PM tendencies
Detail Oriented
Manages the details
Manages the Plan
Doesn’t prefer change
Guardian Temperament
Agile PM tendencies
Encourages Change
Comfortable with Ambiguity
Comfortable with Delegation, Trust
Manages Value
Idealist Temperament
Idealist
These are big picture people who lead followers to pursue
great dreams. They thrive on people issues and gravitate
toward the soft skills: conflict resolution, negotiation,
team building, facilitating.
Diplomacy and strategy are their strong suits
Guardian
People with this temperament like to play by a set of rules.
These are the stabilizers in the organization, working to
keep the boat on an even keel.
Meeting budgets and deadlines and following the plan are
important to Guardians.
The Difference
In waterfall projects you focus on managing people and
tasks, in Agile projects you focus on leading the process
Facilitate decision making versus making the decisions
Deliverable differences
Traditional Agile
Work Breakdown Structure Priorized Backlog
Weekly Status Reports Daily Stand ups
Project Plan Iteration Plan
MS Project Stickies
Problem Solver Problem Solver Assistant
Text Reports Visual Boards
7 Key Traits
Cross Functional
Relationship Builder
Encourages Innovation
Comfortable with ambiguity
Facilitator
Prefers to collaborate
Provide visibility, not status
Cross Functional
Ideally an Agile PM will also play other roles on the project
as well
Analyst
Developer
Tester
Equal team member
Relationship Builder
On a Traditional Project, the Analysts usually own the
relationship with the business
On an Agile Project, the Analysts still have a strong relationship, but the Agile PM needs to also build a strong
relationship to allow them to help to promote value
To do this they need to understand the solution
Encourages Innovation
As an Agile Team member and leader, the Project
Manager need to encourage the team to innovate
This may cause more change, but also more value
One of the ways this is done is by ensuring
Retrospectives as held
And ensuring those retrospectives value innovation
Comfortable with Ambiguity
The Agile PM must be comfortable with ambiguity and
vagueness
The Agile PM must be comfortable with not having a detailed plan or solution up front
Facilitator
The Agile Project Manager does not have a position of
authority
As a consequence, they must excel at facilitating decisions with the client and between team mates
Prefers to Collaborate
An Agile PM, like all Agile team members, must prefer to
collaborate.
Even when this collaboration is not required. This is done because the PM believes that better solutions will arise.
Not because they have to
Provides Visibility, not status
Instead of preparing status reports to communicate
status, the Agile PM creates an environments that
provides total visibility to the status of the project for all
to see
Kanban Boards, Visual Charts, User Story Maps
And one more thing
• Underpinning everything we have discussed is respect for
people
• Some words that seem wrong to use:
- Resources
- Software Factory
- Probably others…
• Agile Project Management is all about helping to maximize
velocity, minimize waste, and respecting every individual
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Agile Prime Directive
"Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly
believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what
they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources
available, and the situation at hand.“
--Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team
Reviews
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Final Thought
• "In traditional projects the team works for the PM to achieve
the PM's goals, in agile projects the PM works for the team
to achieve the team's goals"
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Summary
An Agile Project Manager is a different role and set of skills
that a traditional PM
Usually it helps if the Agile PM has a base competency in another skill set on the project as well
Many of the traditional PM characteristics are still required,
but these Agile characteristics are important to have in
addition
Agile is a Direction
Individuals and Processes and Interactions Tools
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Working Comprehensive software documentation
Customer Contract Collaboration Negotiation
Responding Following to change a plan