Excellent Agile project Manager is the Sword of project success

If you think about the existing scrum framework, you don't have a role in the project manager (Agile PM). In other agile methods, such as feature-driven development (FDD), people still rely on the project manager (PM). However, the role of the project manager has become more responsible for project administration than for coordinating the development team and its activities or dealing with resource issues (also far from the traditional project manager described in the project Management Knowledge System--pmbok). Still taking feature-driven development (FDD) as an example, the above describes the responsibilities of the development manager and not necessarily the responsibility of the project manager. At a tactical level, the Agile project manager should look farther than the general project manager and consider the problem at a strategic level. Agile project managers should not only have the skills of traditional project managers, but also have insights into fast-paced, variable agile projects and their frameworks.

We can consider the Agile project manager as a professional with a number of skills, and the skills he has in a certain demand will enable him to perform multiple roles at the same time. From the scrum framework, these roles can be customer product owners (PO) and scrum Master. For example, in one of our projects, the Agile project manager is a scrum Master in a sprint, and in the next sprint turns into a product owner. Depending on the requirements, the Agile Project manager must be able to perform the role of Scrum master or product owner, rather than replacing the role. Agile Project managers can leverage their own project management expertise for any role (the customer's product owner and the development team's Scrum Master) where support is needed, where the Agile project manager can be found, always for the best output of the project.

In the course of the Agile Software Development project, Scrum Master is often described as "the head of the agile process", and he ensures that the team uses the scrum and agile frameworks properly for development. When we consider nearshore development projects, because of the characteristics of nearshore development-most of the time the development team and product owners are located in different countries, we tend to have multiple principals. In this way, the person responsible for each region is responsible for ensuring the progress of their team to meet the overall schedule of the project. For example, Scrum Master and Agile Project managers can work together to lead the project and lead the team forward. Similarly, because the customer's business partner often does not work with the development team in the same area, the Agile project manager will more closely identify the requirements with the partner to ensure that the project moves in the right direction. In this regard, the Agile project manager represents the customer, whose work will ensure that the team meets the process requirements and, to some extent, the success or failure of the offshore development project, so the role becomes critical. Another responsibility of agile project managers is to coordinate teams that are distributed across different regions. Because of the diversity of the project members and cultural differences, it is not always possible to get used to the "top-down approach", and the Agile project manager will help team members eliminate communication barriers to ensure the project is implemented smoothly.

The responsibilities of the Agile Project manager include (but are not limited to): Select the right team members (personnel), provide guidance and coaching, negotiate product backlog with the product owner, negotiate with the project team the creation process of the product backlog, create, execute, and monitor the project's schedule and cost budget. Responsible for the project cash flow and payment notification, responsible for communication, responsible for risk response plan and procurement management and so on.

Especially in terms of collaboration, the Agile Project manager will be responsible for initiating the project initiation meeting and arranging other project meetings as needed. The Agile project Manager will also be responsible for providing verbal or formal project status reports to project stakeholders and team members, and is responsible for regularly updating and archiving project documentation (for example, the enterprise's project management office requires the appropriate project documentation to be provided according to the standards, We should include the story to create these documents in backlog.

The Agile project manager should also have the following three capabilities: a customer-assisted product owner translates the Enterprise vision into statements that the development team can understand (for example, creating and maintaining sorted product backlog using value engineering (Engineering); helping scrum Master ensures that product owners are right to exercise their rights (to help scrum master withstand pressure from customers) and to assist Scrum Master in confirming that the work of both the customer and the development team conforms to the agile process.

How Agile Project Managers work

To fully understand the work of the Agile project manager, we can cite the example of a Fortune 50 pharmaceutical company. The company has a software development project that is headed by a near-shore development team that contains Scrum master, and the team follows the scrum principle to step through the backlog. The team includes three developers from different backgrounds (who are good at writing code, who are good at web design, have good database, etc.), a tester and a software architect. We view the Agile Project manager and the product owner as the "core members" of the project, who work in the same location but have different areas with the development team. The entire project lasted 66 days and consisted of 5 iterations.

The project begins with the 4-day warm-up phase called "Sprint 0" by the team. During this phase, the team reviews customer-created requirements documents and estimated timelines while patiently waiting for customers to discuss the infrastructure that determines their application. One of the goals of the Sprint 0 phase is to clarify business logic issues through thorough discussions between customers, agile project managers, and development teams, and to ensure that everyone can agree on this.

In the 16-day sprint that followed, the Agile project manager played a pivotal role in coordinating day-to-day communication. This includes arranging a daily meeting for the team, arranging a morning meeting with the customer, checking backlog to ensure that each job is done on time, coaching scrum master to anticipate possible unknown obstacles. Admittedly, a typical scrum project believes that the development team has the ability to track backlog and complete tasks on time. But in this project, the Nearshore team found that because of the geographic barrier between the customer and the team, the Agile project manager has a role to play in tracking the completion status of the project tasks.

The important point I want to point out is that, as with traditional Scrum master, the Agile project manager does not do any of these tasks personally, and our development teams have the ability to organize themselves to handle all assigned tasks. For example, some of the tasks in backlog are very complex, and developers will spontaneously seek help from software architects when they feel that they cannot do it alone. Similarly, developers perform additional tasks such as unit testing, system testing, and regression testing (testing each other's code) in addition to their jobs. They volunteered to help testers complete work that was originally part of the test category. This shows that the team can take care of each other and recognize the importance of the "marginal forces" and work together to reach the level of agility at the organizational level.

The first day of each sprint usually contains a planning link. In this process, the development team breaks down the user story from the product backlog into tasks, evaluates the time required for these tasks, and receives the task. Customers work with agile project managers and development teams to discuss the goals of each sprint, and the development team will write these goals on the whiteboard on the office.

Within the next 14 days, the team will be required to participate in the 15-minute scrum meeting every morning, in addition to their own development. At the meeting, the Agile project manager Reviews 3 things with the team through a webcam: the work done the day before, the work to be done on that date, and any obstacles that might hinder the team from achieving sprint goals. In addition, the Agile project manager attends another 30-minute conference call every day to discuss the obstacles and solutions that arise in the meeting with the product owner. The last day of each sprint will be a 1-hour demo unit, and the development team will show customers and stakeholders the capabilities of the sprint development.