Protecting the Team with the Project Manager

The agile approach introduces a lot of new strategies and roles. However, one of the changes that agile brings about is the ambiguous role of the Project Manager. The role of the Project Manager in an agile team is not the same as other forms of project management. Due to this effect, sometimes Project Managers, or even entire Agile teams, find themselves without a clearly defined role for the Project Manager. Often this leaves Project Managers feeling under essential resulting in it becoming harder to self-motivate and motivate others. In addition, Project Managers who’ve experience almost an entire career without agile have a significantly harder time adjusting to agile and adapting the agile mentality.

We can observe this resentful adaptation in not only at a team level, but also higher up the company hierarchy. A lot of Director and Senior Managers started out as traditional Project Managers. This can equate to the company-wide (for the most projects) process of adapting agile more difficult and uncertain.

Project managers can take one of two routes for their roles. The first role is at a team level and is usually where you find most of the Project Managers. In this route, the Project manager works in the team. When working in a team the Project Manager must put in great effort to truly rethink their approach to tackling projects. This task is not always easy as a lot of Project Managers have been practicing and thinking about their job for a specific way for many decades. We’re asking them to throw almost all their skills away and go back to the mental chalk board. For a project manager to succeed in a team level they must remain open-minded and motivated.

The second and usually less common route for a Project Manager is working at the portfolio level. When working at the portfolio level the project manager does not actually work with or interact with the agile team, instead they manage groups of projects called portfolios. However, most companies don’t have a project management office so there is no need for a Project Manager working at the portfolio level. It is also difficult to remain self-motivated at the portfolio level.

For agile teams to really succeed when embracing a Project Manager, everyone must buy in to the system and work together. It is not easy for a lot of people to switch to the agile approach, especially Project Managers. Agile is much unlike other methodologies before it. If you find yourself working in an agile team for the first time and everything doesn’t feel completely different, then chances are that team is not executing agile correctly.

Work Cited:

“Agile at Work: Protecting the Team with the Project Manager. “ Lynda.com – from LinkedIn, https://www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-tutorials/Protecting-team-project-manager/175073/379423-4.html Accessed 6 Nov. 2017.

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