Yes, Virginia, there is Project Management in Agile

Yes, Virginia, there is project management in Agile. I know you hear all the time from Agilists that projects don’t exist in agile, but that is far from the truth. The Agile manifesto mentions projects and plans, so they expressly understood that projects and the need for some type of management would need to be in place.

Yes, we do project management in Agile, but we do it differently. Our projects don’t have fixed scope and dates, instead, they are replaced with initiatives that have quantifiable outcomes. With those outcomes identified we work to deliver them as quickly as possible and we stop when we have delivered what we planned on doing, which is the direct opposite of traditional waterfall project management.

The need for project managers does however change as almost all the ‘project management’ of an agile team’s work is handled by the Scrum Master and Product Owner. What agile provides is significant transparency to both how work is progressing and what has been delivered. Project managers are expected to be task and time managers and none of that is needed in agile delivery. In agile, we know every sprint (a couple of weeks) whether the value and work we expect to deliver are delivered.

We do need to have some level of reporting that project managers can facilitate along with helping teams resolve impediments that are outside their sphere of influence, however, a good Scrum Master should be able to handle that.

Having been a project manager prior to adopting agile as a preferred way of working, I know that if we are still managing our agile projects in a traditional sense, then I will leverage the transparency that agile projects me in order to effectively communicate where a project is at with real information gleaned from the team, over-relying on people’s personal assessment of how the project is going. As an agile project manager, my focus changes from budget management to monitoring the cost of the value delivery. I want to ensure that the expected value outcomes are in line with the total cost (by sprints) that has been planned. There cannot be an assumption that agile teams can continue to deliver stuff that isn’t tied back to cost in a meaningful way.

So, when someone asks you if there is project management in agile, the answer is yes, but it’s not at all what you think it is.