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The case for Project Management in Agile?

OK, I know how most of the Agile community feels about Project Managers:
Process over People
Meetings
Documentation

Urrgh...

But however you name the role (Agile Delivery, Scrum Master, Project Manager) and whoever does it  - someone needs to help the team to:

Plan
Track
Deliver
Communicate

Being a group of incredibly talented engineers does not give a team the right to ignore 3.5 of these.

All too often, engineers want to dive in to designing and building great software, but see planning as a hassle, tracking as a waste of time (or an abuse of their rights), communication as an alien concept and delivery (the fun bit) as something that will be done when it's done.

It may be popular to talk about being a 'self-organising team' and railing against any form of 'order' being imposed.  But why is that order being imposed?  Maybe it's to deal with the chaos that your s-o-t has failed to deal with so far.

As organisations scale and the senior leadership gets further and further from the day-to-day, they don't want to impose rules and process for the sake of it.  But a few months of teams being unable to commit to delivery estimates, flagging issues at the last moment, and generally being a black box from which unpleasant surprises regularly emerge - well, that forces the issue.

It's not an attempt to stifle your creativity, slow you down, or oppress you in the workplace.  It's an attempt to stay in business.

So when I say 'Project Management', I don't necessarily mean Project Managers.  Just someone in every team with a PM's mindset.

- Can we consistently plan and execute sprints/iterations in a highly dependable fashion?
- Are we laser focussed on our next milestone/release and delivering its benefits?  Are our stakeholders aware of what we're working on, why and when we're looking to be live?
- Are we on track? Are we managing expectations?  Are we feeding our learnings into longer term planning and communicating that early and often?

Any decent management team wants to manage by exception.  When things go wrong - and of course things always do - you'll be the team that is able to point out the impacts early, replan if needed, and make sure changes are communicated.   

The trust this will engender from any good leadership team should mean more freedom in your day to day. 



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