Starting Your Project Management Career with Agile

If you're a developer or IT pro looking to enter the fray of project management, Agile might be the place to start because its self-directed teams allow members to practice planning and management strategies. If you're on an Agile team, you can move into a Scrum Master role as a way to test the waters and see if project management is your path.

Project Manager Titles and Duties in Agile

Traditionally, a project manager plans, gathers, and manages tasks and resources so that the project achieves its scope and quality within time and budget. One common model sorts the activities of a manager into four buckets:

• Planning: Figuring out goals, the steps to get there, and the constraints.

• Organizing: Bringing together and structuring the people and resources needed to reach goals.

• Leading: Communicating goals, motivating the team, and resolving conflicts.

• Control: Tracking progress toward goals, diagnosing problems, and making adjustments or corrections.

An Agile project re-factors many of the duties of a traditional project manager across multiple roles. Whatever role you play, you'll gain relevant experience and the leadership aspects of the Scrum Master (or Agile coach) are particularly significant. Below, we'll use Scrum as an archetypal example of an Agile development framework.

The Scrum Master facilitates and protects the team and the process, keeping things moving. The Scrum Master's project management duties include leadership (specifically servant leadership) to the team, resolving impediments that hinder progress, and ensuring the Agile process is followed.

The Product Owner represents the customer's or user's interests, manages the Product Backlog, and thus decides what is included in the final product. The Product Owner's project management responsibilities involve prioritizing requirements, controlling costs, and managing stakeholder expectations.

The Team Members (developers, testers, writers, etc.) are motivated individuals trusted with the project's success. Their particular project management duties include task allocation (via sprint planning) and status reporting (in the daily Scrum stand-ups and the sprint review meeting).

Some traditional project manager duties are spread across the entire Agile project: estimation and planning (in sprint planning, demos/retrospectives, and continuously during the sprint), risk management (ditto), and overall accountability for project goals.

Team Members and Project Management Skills

Any role within an Agile project offers opportunities for practicing project management skills. Team members gain experience in several ways.

• Because planning by the self-organizing team happens just-in-time throughout the project, team members get valuable experience in planning and estimating.

• The daily Scrum standups provide regular practice in status reporting, analyzing and troubleshooting obstacles, and learning from each other. If the project uses Kanban practices, additional practice in tracking progress and creatively tackling team-level bottlenecks occurs.

• Exposure to gathering and leveraging metrics is gained by team-wide awareness of Agile metrics like Scrum's Burndown Rate and Kanban's Lead Time.

• The sprint demo provides the experience of interacting with the customer (or customer proxy), and the retrospective gives practice in analyzing team performance and improving practices (process improvement).

The Scrum Master Role

Moving into the Scrum Master role gives you key experience with team leadership.

The Scrum Master is focused on individuals and interactions, a facilitator and protector rather than the boss. This provides a great opportunity to practice the soft skills needed by any leader, including communication, listening, team building, nurturing team members' growth, problem-solving techniques, negotiation, conflict resolution, optimism, and acting as a change agent.

Broadening to Non-Agile PM Skills

Agile frameworks distribute many project management responsibilities across the team, but some traditional project manager tasks are absent. Some are outside the scope of most Agile projects, and some are superfluous in Agile but still appear in other types of projects.

What if you must lead a project with non-Agile aspects, or your project must work closely with a non-Agile project? If project management is your trajectory, consider learning more about non-Agile project management so you have a versatile toolbox.

Leadership

Non-Agile projects do not presume a self-organizing team. The organization is typically hierarchical, and the project manager is the boss who team members report to, with authority over them in a chain of command. This requires a somewhat different mix of skills than the servant leader role of the Scrum Master.

The non-Agile project manager is responsible for the details of task definitions and for assigning tasks to people. The project manager is also responsible for awareness of the big-picture view of the project's state.

Planning

An Agile project has continual just-in-time organic planning. It is also often preceded by an upfront, high-level planning exercise that pencils in a ballpark sketch of the architecture, top-level plan, and estimates; this supports the go/no-go decision and the project launch.

In contrast, traditional project planning involves a large upfront effort to predict the overall trajectory of the project in detail, including the sequencing of all anticipated tasks, start/finish dates, labor estimates, etc. This sort of large-scale detailed planning is supported by several sophisticated planning methodologies, which include accompanying charts and tools.

Tracking and Course Corrections

In Agile projects, tracking progress and making course corrections are inherent in how the team continually responds to change. In a non-Agile project, the detailed, upfront plan is the basis for measuring progress, detecting deviations, and responding with corrections. And there are methodologies and tools to support that.

Status Reporting

 In an Agile project, status reporting is lightweight and driven by the Agile boards the team uses every day. It also presumes the regular involvement of stakeholders who are involved (directly or by proxy) in sprint planning and reviews.

In contrast, non-Agile reporting is based on the upfront detailed plan and involves producing separate documents that roll up status to inform upper management and stakeholders who are not regularly engaged with the project.

Learning about these aspects of project management is beneficial not only for being flexible enough to manage projects with non-Agile aspects but also for interfacing with your broader organization, where Agile has not penetrated.

Ready to Kick Start Your Project Management Career?

Is project management in your career path? An Agile project is a great chance to try out project management skills, and the Scrum Master role, in particular, gives you great practice with key leadership skills.

Learn more with CBT Nuggets’ new Agile Project Management Training course.