Agile and PM Role

We have often know that there is no Project Manager (PM) role in Agile project. However, many organisations still retain the symbolic PM role. This is not cost effective and why does organisations preserve the PM role.

Why PM is Staying

Unfortunately, PM hold a great political position and influence for many organisations. While there is a shift from traditional waterfall to agile, PM role continues to remain for a main reason. That main reason is coordination. The PM role is now relegated to a coordinator role. This role is focused to coordinate the reporting between the project and management. In other words, this information gatekeeper role places the PM in an influential and yet non productive position.

Agile PM

Although Agile does not require PM, there is a dire need to remove information gatekeeper. Therefore, you are seeing an emerging role of Agile PM. This role are actually a hybrid of Agile developer or product owner who take on the additional efforts to connect with the management. In another words, they bridge the gap between Agile team and management. Effectively, this should remove the information gatekeeper influence and gap.

For many Agile team, we have agreed that there is no PM. However, the reality of PM existed for many organisations. These PM may not understood Agile and become information gatekeeper between Agile team and management. While a role of Agile PM is emerging, the battle continue to either remove or bridge the gap with Agile PM.