The Project Manager "Problem"

I've been invited to speak at the next scheduled meeting of the local chapter of the Project Management Institute. It was requested that I make my presentation "about Agile" but the rest of the direction was pretty much left to my imagination and questionable discretion. As such, I've come up with material under the banner of:

"My Life As A PM Is Over: The Company Just Went Agile!"

Now, that title is most certainly intended to be attention-grabbing, humourous and perhaps even a little ironic. That latter characteristic stems from the slightly-nebulous view in which some in the Agile community hold Project Managers. At one extreme fringe of perspectives on the topic is the one that says, essentially, "Now that you've gone Agile, you can get rid of all your PMs!" A more moderate stance shows up in some of the Scrum literature, which advocates for having most or all of your Project Managers transition into the Scrum Master role. All the way at the other edge of possibilities lies the approach that I saw undertaken while I was the Agile Manager in my last job: keep the PMs as PMs, and figure out how to make that predictive, deadline-focused paradigm work in an iterative, adaptive environment. (Those who've read my two AgileMan books will recall that, many good intentions notwithstanding, we struggled greatly in integrating those two very different world views.) Even with that attempt to keep things somewhat as they were in the PMO, though, I think all of the people involved would agree that the PM role changed considerably as we moved through our Agile transition. Therefore, in all cases, there's some bitter irony to saying, "My life as a PM is over..."

For my material, I'm starting with what I presented to the 3rd year Project Management course last November. There's quite a bit of overlap, it seems to me. In both cases, I need to start off by describing what Agile is, under the assumption that some won't have even heard of it. Then, I'd be foolish not to acknowledge right away that many of the principles and practices of Agile can, and probably should, strike some project management types as idealistic, at best, and heretical, at worst. And finally, I want attendees to get a sense of how the role can still add value and be rewarding within an Agile framework. The biggest difference, of course, is that next week I'll be talking to people who have presumably been out in the real world actually running projects for a number of years now. That should mean that they're even more cynical, or at least skeptical, about the practicality of an adaptive approach. Will customers/product areas ever really sign up for a system in which change is expected throughout the process? Won't scope creep simply cause projects to run on forever? How can you let those developing the software also test it? And so on.

In providing feedback to Mike Cohn on his next Agile book recently, one of the places where I really challenged him was around his treatment of what to do with Project Managers. I thought that the draft version I reviewed made too light of the problem, not acknowledging just how much of a leap of faith is required in several aspects of his recommendation. If a company's culture has a strong dependency on micro-tracking of deliverables, who's really going to take that up if the PMs are re-purposed to other duties? Will most PMs, some of whom have spent considerable time and money getting their PMP certification, really want to risk losing it by directing themselves to activities which won't keep them current as PMs? How many individuals in the PMO really want to become Scrum Masters / Agile Coaches? I think those are just some of the vital questions that need to be addressed on this topic, and I believe too many of us have glossed over them in the past. I may not know the answers, but at least now I'm aware that the discussions have to happen.

It should be interesting to see how all of this goes over with the group next week! If you never hear from me afterward, you can draw your own conclusions...