Agile Project Management: Thinking Differently
This evening I viewed again the 2012 film Hannah Arendt. I remember being so deeply drawn into this film the first time I saw it—as I was again tonight. While speaking about one woman who thought critically in a time struggling with its recent history, it also says much about the challenges of thinking clearly and thinking differently.
Last Friday, I attended and facilitated the monthly Agile PDX Downtown Pub Lunch discussion. This month the topic was “What exactly IS an Agile Project Manager?” This group chooses its topic for the next month at the close of the current month’s discussion. The group chose that topic in April, when I could not be there due to the exigencies of turning around a red project and, in so doing, enacting the role of an Agile Project Manager.
In this same newsletter issue you will see an article by Allen Chiang outlining his experience some years ago leading a mission-critical, very large, and at the time, no doubt, cutting edge technical project. He describes how aspects of Agile were used in conjunction with traditional project management to ensure overall project success. In some ways, it reminds me of a model I created in 2009 to help clients understand how agile could fit within their PMO approach from the traditional project management viewpoint. I have used this approach to the advantage of several clients over the years.
Joseph Flahiff, whom some of you may have heard speak on the “Agile—Broadly” panel last June, published an interesting article which helps PM’s in non-Agile environments understand how to be “Agile in a Waterfall World.” Sliger and Broderick’s The Software Project Manager’s Bridge to Agility is an excellent source on what it means to be an Agile Project Manager which is recommended to aspiring Agile Certified Practitioners by the global Project Management Institute right along with Jim Highsmith’s Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products. There are many resources to help project managers develop a grasp of what it means to be an Agile Project Manager.
Though, interestingly, when we were having our roundtable discussion last Friday, the very topic seemed to be difficult for the attendees to discuss. Unfortunately, that’s not surprising. We’ve been told Agile is this “hot new trend,” but we also hear about people like Allen Chiang who have used Agile methods before Agile was cool or even called Agile. In 2009, a project I led won the Project of the Year Award in this chapter, and it couldn’t have won that award if it were not for the agile techniques we applied in the context of traditional project management.
Agilists are protective of Agile much as traditional PM’s are protective of their own professional domain. They know a lot about it, and some of what they have come to understand is profoundly subtle, significant and pervasive of agility. They know that, any agile practice, framework or method must be grounded in the Agile Manifesto and Principles in order to be agile. And, they know that this means a lot more than having standups and working in an iterative fashion.
Last Friday, I brought a few PM colleagues with me to the conversation. There were, as there generally are, a few new faces including Project Managers, Product Owners, and an Engineering Manager or two. There were also some extremely experienced agilists with opinions well-grounded in experience—as well as research behind them. It was clear that no one wanted to offend anyone else—especially when I put the hard questions on the table:
- Do we really need PM’s in agile?
- Under what circumstances?
- Why, or why not?
Some of the PMs at the table considered themselves experienced in working with Agile teams. Some were exploring. We talked about whether PMs have a role in helping Agile work or emerge in organizations, and alternatively (the elephant in the room) whether they hinder it.
One of the contributions that formal project management methodologies have made is to imbue the PMs—who really come to understand the methodologies and build their toolset—with an ability to fluidly make use of project management skills and thinking tools. As we discussed last Friday, PM’s are often enculturated to wield influence-building skills that can trump positional power. That is scary for many people and often doesn’t appear collaborative, group-focused, or likely to support the power and accountability model with which Agile is imbued.
In the early 2000’s I liked to take on Agile Project Manager roles because it basically meant I could do anything I wanted. There weren’t a lot of guideposts. Now there are more—many more. Even PMI has set up a certification model—which isn’t the same as defining a role, but at least we have something of a rubric.
Now, when there IS an Agile Project Manager role available, defining what that means has, perhaps, become more important. For instance, an Agile Project Manager may function very differently in the presence of a strong Scrum Team than with a Kanban Team or in an environment where the work group has evolved its own flavor of Agile. Some Agile PMs may have a need for competency with Lean because their organization’s pursuit of agility relies heavily on a Lean adoption. Some PMs may actually lead Agile adoptions and therefore look more like Agile Coaches.
But, wherever there is an Agile Project Manager, that role will probably work best if it is not confused with already well-established Agile roles such as Scrum Master, Product Owner, XP Coach, Team Member. Even in the absence of these well-defined Agile roles, a PM can help a project adopt Agile practices in the interest of improved project execution. Though, as discussed last Friday, just because you have an Agile project that doesn’t mean you need to have an Agile Project Manager.
As I read, watch, listen, and practice, the key differences between traditional and Agile Project Managers seem to be:
- The level they manage the project at.
- Their grasp of Agile principles, practices, and frameworks.
- Their use of power and accountability.
In June 2014, Jeff Oltmann and I will be speaking together about this at the PMI Portland Chapter meeting. We’ve had several conversations over the last year about the similarities and differences between traditional and Agile project management—and whether either approach to project management is working. We’ll likely still be continuing that conversation in front of the audience that night. Until then, I invite you to pay attention to typical attitudes outside our field to project managers and project management, and you can begin your observations and reflection with something as simple as this Google search for images of “project manager.”
Hannah Arendt was looking hard at the nature of evil, which was based on personal experience as well as academic study and training. The conclusions she came to were not in alignment with the popular thinking of the day—that the holocaust was an exceptional evil. Her thinking drew her to the conclusion, rather, that evil is frequently banal and institutional. She faced tremendous onslaughts from friends and colleagues for publishing her writing on the topic but, as she points out at one point in the film—she was being attacked because of the assumptions in the minds of others, not because of the points she actually made.
In my time as the global PMI Agile Community of Practice Chapter Engagement Representative for Portland, I have seen an interesting amount of vocal dissent with regard to the efficacy of Agile—or the unique value an Agile approach can bring. For months, I attended roundtables and listened to outraged deprecations of Agile. And, the odd thing was, I couldn’t even get a word in edgewise to agree with the vocal dissenters. There have been many poor applications of Agile practices and many less than stellar Agile adoptions, and these PM’s were, generally, advocating against what agilists know to be poor practice, though it masqueraded as Agile in the organizations these PM’s spoke from. What interests me is the extent to which project managers may or may not have been involved in contributing to these wasted efforts---either through fear and loathing or through lack of experience and the firm conviction to learn. Christopher Argyris has written much about the extreme difficulty of learning, and for those of us whose very livelihoods are based on driving projects to success against sometimes grim odds, learning something new that may seem counter-intuitive amounts to a leap of faith unless we have done our homework backwards and forwards.
While I am not in the role of boosting the PMI ACP, I do see it as an interesting opportunity to crack open the conversation about agile—and to provide project managers already familiar with traditional project management approaches a broad grounding in a range of practices that can drive, not only project success, but organizational agility. A goal that, it seems, our professional association deems worthy.
See you in June.
About the Author
Jean Richardson is an agile coach and project management professional with more than 20 years’ experience. Her initial agile training, the Certified Scrum Master (CSM) credential, was provided by Ken Schwaber, one of the two developers of the Scrum framework. You can read her blog on leadership, agile, and project management at http://azuregate.net/blog-archive/ and link with her at http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=7674981&trk=tab_pro. You can correspond with her at jean@azuregate.net.