The Agile Project Manager - fact or fiction ?

© Disciplined Agile Consortium 1
The Agile Project Manager
Fact or Fiction?

Daniel Gagnon CDAI, CDAC,PMP, PMI-ACP, SPC4, CSM, LSSYB
• Over 20 Years of Project and Project Portfolio
Management experience
• Enterprise Lean/Agile thought and practice leader, past
8 years in large Canadian Financial institutions
• Certified Disciplined Agile Coach and Instructor
• DAC member since 2014, member DAC Advisory
Council
• Instructor for Montreal PMI Chapter's PMI-ACP
certification exam prep course
• Contributor/Instructor, Agile for Project Managers, McGill
University
2
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/dgagnonleanagile

Agenda
• The context of large organizations
• The Agile magic wand
• Agile Roles
• Where can PMs add value
• Conclusion

4
A PROJECT MANAGER VENTURED ON TO THE FIELD, BUT LUCKILY
THE SCRUM BOYS WERE SOON WISE TO HIS TRICKS

Large organizations and the Cynefin model
By Snowden - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33783436
(Stewart) identifies battlefields,
markets, ecosystems and
corporate cultures as complex
systems that are "impervious to a
reductionist, take-it-apart-and-see-
how-it-works approach, because
your very actions change the
situation in unpredictable ways."[19]

Enterprise history and legacy
• This material in this presentation applies to large organizations with
long and deep histories struggling to come to terms with the need to
modernize their business solutions delivery paradigm
• Examples include (but are not limited to) financial institutions,
retailers, government agencies, restaurant chains, transport and
logistics companies
• In other words, organizations that need to evolve from a less than
ideal starting point (contrarily to the Facebooks, LinkedIns and
Googles) and have to contend with legacy cultures, legacy
organizational structures, and legacy IT infrastructures.

The Agile Magic Wand
• Although explicitly specified as a legitimate role in both DSDM and
the Agile Unified Process, the Project Manager role is conspicuously
absent from the bulk of today’s mainstream Agile frameworks
• The rationale is usually along the lines that the responsibilities of the
Project Manager are divided amongst the Scrum Master/Agile
coach, the Product Owner and the teams
• This is actually wishful thinking in the context of large, complex
organizations – akin to waving a magic wand
7
© Disciplined Agile Consortium

Agile Roles – Scrum Masters / Coaches
• Scrum Masters / Coaches need to concentrate on providing
stewardship of their teams’ values, processes and behaviours
• In some organizations, these individuals are viewed and treated
almost as command and control Project managers – made
“responsible” for increasing velocity or productivity for example. This
is a clear antipattern
• Do not always possess the political skillset necessary to effectively
navigate organizational channels – this limits their ability to “remove
impediments” beyond a very basic team level
8

Agile Roles – Product Owners
• A complex and demanding role, one of the hinges of Agile success
or failure
• All of their energy needs to be directed towards Value identification
and benefits hypotheses
• A frequent antipattern observed is that of POs engaging with the
various moving parts of the enterprise without the benefit of
thorough stakeholder analysis. This leads to incomplete product
vision and flawed road maps as scope becomes injected late in the
process (when the forgotten stakeholders appear on the scene –
usually brandishing pitchforks and torches)
9

Roles in general
• One of the main messages of today’s session is that we should not
allow ourselves to blindly constrain our organizations to the canon of
methods and frameworks
• In the end, the key is to empower people to do their best by tapping
into intrinsic motivation. Using people's skills at cross-purposes for
the sake of following a recipe is not constructive
• In the following section, we’ll examine how Project managers of
varying degrees of experience and expertise can add value to our
agile endeavours – either by bringing skills to the table the other
roles lack, or taking on tasks that underuse other roles
10

Project Managers can add value in many areas

Example / Walkthrough
• An architectural Spike is carried out in iteration 12 of a multi-release
initiative. The working hypothesis was that an existing service could
be consumed in order to add an important new client-valued feature
• The hypothesis is discovered to be false. The service would need to
be modified, the contract changed, and substantial non-regression
testing across multiple platforms would be required
• Aspects of the new feature would also call into question the manner
in which explicit consent would need to be obtained from customers
regarding the use and storage of their data, drawing corporate
privacy and security firmly into the ranks of active stakeholders

• Legal, Finance and Risk would also need to be involved in order to
review the implications of what the spike revealed
• Another rather unhelpful aspect soon comes to light: Marketing have
been hard at work on a campaign which would sell the benefits of
the new feature to the entire user base – and have been working
from a Roadmap that the PO has not had the time to update in the
last 2 iterations.

Example / Walkthrough – LIVE POLL
• It’s time for an interactive experiment
• Using the polling feature, please vote for whom you think would be
the most appropriate individual to handle this situation
1 – the agile coach
2 – the Product Owner
3 – a Project Manager
4 – a Business analyst

Example / Walkthrough – LIVE POLL
• Results
1 – the agile coach
2 – the Product Owner
3 – a Project Manager
4 – a Business analyst

• This type of situation can completely sidetrack Product Owners, as
they are drawn into a political and administrative quagmire. No other
useful progress can be made while they deal with it.
• Nor is it within the purview of scrum masters or coaches – as
mentioned earlier, they need to concentrate on team processes and
behaviours (and would likely not possess the political credibility to
deal with a wide array of enterprise functions)
• Although it will require the hard work of a BA to unravel a lot of the
tangles described, actually galvanizing the organization to
collaborate towards a solution is best left to a project manager with
the skills to see the job through

• This is only one of a very large number of possible situations in
which the project, and the organization as a whole would benefit
from access to deep project management skills
• In this case, the PM could
– organize the necessary meetings and workshops with all stakeholders
– work with the PO and Business analysts to ensure capture of all
concerns
– ensure clear and concise communication around the issues, and work
to obtain the cooperation of all required corporate actors

A few more practical examples

A few more practical examples:
Traceability tends to
be the bane of Agile
teams existence, as
it would appear to be
baked into the
methods – but rarely
truly is. A Junior PM
or PCO assigned by
the PMO could work
with team members
and the coach to
ensure tight
discipline in terms of
tying user Stories
and Epics back to
higher level scope.

Dedicated
change
management
resources are not
systematically
built into all
project budgets.
Experienced PMs
can help via
efficient
stakeholder
analysis as well
as with robust
communication
plans

Agile aware and
friendly PMs can
greatly assist in
the drafting and
application of
procurement
contracts that
respect the
iterative,
incremental and
adaptive nature
of agile solutions
delivery

The Agile PM can help PMOs adapt and evolve
their governance and gating processes to a
leaner state

Well-executed and governed agility inherently
reduces risk – but overt, explicit risk
management remains an excellent practice, and
one that the PM can proactively oversee
Example of a JIRA risk management plugin

In the case of an evolving product or platform
serviced by dedicated agile teams, PMs or PCOs
can help alleviate the PO’s substantial workload
by maintaining open and noise-free
communication channels with corporate
marketing and communications. Sharing the
vision and roadmap, providing updates on MVP
release windows are some of the issues that
could be addressed

Working with Finance and the EPMO, an Agile
PM could help evolve program and portfolio
reporting, e.g. by providing guidance around
agile capitalization (and the necessary line of
sight into the roadmap and the content of MVPs)

At a higher level, Agile Project managers should
• Act as diligent organizational navigators, coordinators, facilitators
and negotiators
• Work hand-in-hand with the coaches, POs, and the entire team in
order to ensure early and effective communications and alignment
• Have neither the time nor the slightest inclination to micro-manage
the team
• Are firm advocates and contributors to the constant evolution of
organizational governance and agility

As to the question in the title of this presentation …
• The notion that large, complex organizations can effectively deliver
high-quality business solutions without the help of skilled project
managers is pure fiction.
• The fact is that we still need the political savvy, organizational
awareness and time-proven techniques that professional project
managers bring to the table

Parting thoughts…
• Many of you will have noticed that the example I used about the
architectural Spike was actually symptomatic of a few (alas typical)
organizational dysfunctions / misses – e.g.,
– Why was something so risky left until iteration 12 ?
– Why have waited until it was inevitable to invite corporate security and
privacy functions to the table?
– Why was a 2-month reality vs. plan gap allowed to develop?
– Why wasn’t anyone checking in with Marketing more frequently?

Parting thoughts…
• The answer to all of these questions can be best summed up as :
20th century agile and its resistance to the very idea of project
managers – in addition to a hyperfocus on Business value alone, to
the detriment of other types of work (architecture, technical debt, risk
reduction)
• Lightweight DA Milestones and governance address these issues
quite directly and efficiently:

DAD Milestones
Milestone Fundamental Question Asked
Stakeholder vision Do stakeholders agree with your strategy?
Proven architecture Can you actually build this?
Continued viability Does the effort still make sense?
Sufficient functionality Does it make sense to release the current solution?
Production ready Will the solution work in production?
Delighted stakeholders Are stakeholders happy with the deployed solution?
30

The Disciplined Agile Enterprise

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disciplined agile development. Your
goal is to build a strong foundation from
which to build upon.
At the ha stage you reflect upon and
question why disciplined agile strategies
work, seeking to understand the range
of strategies available to you and
when they are best applied.
At the ri stage you seek to extend and
improve upon disciplined agile
techniques, sharing your learnings with
others.

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