Written by: Janine Whiteman, PMP

Is there room for Project Management in Agile?

Overview      Sabarsky-Leon

Enterprise Agile Transformation Consultant / Agile Coach / Trainer Leon Sabarsky, made a case for how Project Managers can exist and bring value within agile transformations and agile organizations. Project management skills are still needed; some Project Managers may become great Scrum Masters (with training and coaching), while others may have success at the program or portfolio level. The most value comes in blending Agile and traditional, plan-driven project management principles and practices in the right proportions to fit the situation. For example, consider a Team facing Scrum Master paired with an external facing Product Owner/Project Manager. There is a lot of project management going on even though you might not find anyone with the title “Project Manager

Takeaways

  • The Project Management functions still exist but must be taken care of with a different apprFeb-Agile-pic-2oach. Allow for distributed project management if you divide roles and responsibilities depending on internal and external functions to the dev team
  • Consider a PM/SM blend with Project Managers external to the team or teams and Scrum Masters internal to the team
  • PMs can work at many levels including at the Program and Portfolio levels
  • Project Managers and Scrum Masters can complement each other, they are not competitive roles
  • Embrace coaching and training

Next Event

Join us at the next PMI Atlanta Agile Forum on Tuesday, March 16, 2021

Keynote Presentation: "Leading Agile Transformations by aligning everyone on a 3-step approach" presented by Maximilian "Max" Ekesi, Whole Foods (Amazon subsidiary) / Enterprise Agile Coach

Register at https://pmiatlanta.org/events/event-calendar

About PMI

Atlanta Chapter serves the Project Management Community in Metro Atlanta, and we're an active resource to corporations, community and government agencies throughout north Georgia. With over 5,000 members, PMI Atlanta is among the top 5 chapters in the world. Our professional expertise span across industries; we’re the professionals building healthcare information technology systems, the engineers developing smarter public transportation, and the planners growing our communities more efficiently.