Agile Strategy Do not become a taskmaster. If tasks are not getting done, the project team probably feels that the internal project plan needs to change. Look outside of your project for nontechnical points that support or dissuade these changes, then present them to the technical leaders for discussion.
The third possibility is that the project manager simply loses credibility with the project team. The team knows that the original plan needs to shift, but the inward-focused project manager sees changes to the plan as variances that will only delay the project and impact his perception of project success. The team members may not know explicitly what the project manager needs to do (after all, it’s not their job), but they do know that sticking steadfastly to the original plan isn’t it. While there is certainly some room for debate, the project manager must be prepared to try some alternative approaches, or risk losing credibility. If he cannot strike a balance or justify his position with the team, passive and active resistance may develop. Eventually, the project manager risks being pushed, once again, into an administrative support role, thus greatly reducing the value that he could add to the project.
The agile project manager recognizes that changes and iterations to the plan will happen. In fact, they are necessary for the project’s ultimate success. She will look for ways to help direct those changes in a way that will support the high-level business needs, rather than fighting them on the grounds of outdated project boundaries.
Agile Strategy Continually scan the external environment, looking for business drivers that may affect the project. Identifying these influences for the team will help you make the right course changes during the project.
By scanning the environment outside of the project itself, the project manager can identify business drivers that, when combined with the technical drivers, will help the team decide which direction to go when confronted with a fork in the road. The rest of the project team is focused internally. From their internal focus, the team will drive change from a technical perspective. The project manager should balance those technical inputs with the corresponding external influences. If she doesn’t do this, the project risks falling out of alignment with the business objectives.
Rather than waiting for some unexpected, external event to come crashing down on the project, the project manager should actively search the external environment for such events. Just as individuals may bring technical issues and information to the rest of the team for discussion and consideration, the project manager should bring external business information back to the team so that they can evaluate its impact on their work.
Agile Strategy Add value to the team and gain credibility by bringing relative, external information to the table so it can be discussed along with the technical elements surfaced by other team members.
If the project manager is not a technical expert, it is even more important to look outward for valuable information that may affect the project. In an agile environment, the project manager is rarely handed formal authority over the team. She must establish her own credibility to successfully lead the team. In this situation, a surefire way to lose credibility is for the project manager to challenge technical experts on technical issues. On the other hand, a way to gain credibility is to trust that team members know what they’re doing, while bringing them additional, valuable information from outside of the project that complements their own information.
You may ask, “With all this looking outside the project, who’s watching the plan?” The answer is: You are. It’s just that you’ll spend less energy focused on driving the original plan and more energy on facilitating the changes that will get you to your final destination. I realize that there are only so many hours in the day. Surveying the external environment, in addition to watching the internals of the project, may be overload. This leads me into the discussion of the agile project management infrastructure, which is a topic discussed in further detail in Chapter 10. In essence, an agile PM infrastructure is a concise toolkit geared toward efficiently managing the relevant internals of project execution, thus freeing up much of the project manager’s time to focus externally.
Tracking External Trends and Variances
An interesting dynamic of having an external view is that, when it expands your perspective of the project, it leads you to monitor untraditional metrics as barometers of project progress. In classic PM, the project manager usually monitors variance to the internal elements of schedule, scope, and cost to judge project success. However, in an agile project, monitoring variance to the plan may be a futile exercise. As project managers, we want to facilitate the correct course changes necessary for project success. Making the actual course-change decisions is probably driven by both technical needs and external events, and you must consider both. Since these decisions are influenced by external events, you’ll need to monitor variances and trends in these events (see Figure 5-2).
Figure 5-2: Trends and variances monitored by the project manager in an agile versus classic environment.
By monitoring the trends in external business influencers, the project manager and team are better able to make the decisions that will keep their project aligned with the true business needs. It is in these tactical project decisions that the integration of the project and the business really pays off.
Agile Strategy Track trends of key external influencers, as well as variances from what is expected, and you will move from being reactive to proactive.
The Project Manager as Facilitator and Leader
In the agile environment, the project manager is more of a facilitator than a manager. She must rely on her influencing skills, rather than on formal authority, to get things done. Oftentimes, she (the project manager) is a peer to the individual team members in the organizational pecking order. Acting as a facilitator is nonthreatening to peers, whereas acting as a manager (i.e., giving orders) can be perceived as overstepping her bounds, making it more difficult to establish herself with the team. As her credibility is established, the project manager may evolve into a coach and sounding board for second opinions. Once this happens, the team will be discussing technical obstacles with the project manager instead of withholding them from the taskmaster. As the project manager increasingly becomes the melting pot for project information (both internal and external), she may soon find herself in the enviable position of project leader.
Agile Strategy Act as more of a facilitator than a manager. Not only is this approach nonthreatening and less confrontational, it will help you establish yourself with the team so that you evolve into its leader.
The road to establishing leadership in an agile environment is a tricky one. Rarely will the project manager have formal authority over the project team. She may have the “project manager” title bestowed upon her, but like other individual contributors on the team, she must prove her worth. The key difference between the project manager and other individual contributors is that there is an implicit assumption that the project manager role is that of a leader. So, while it is relatively straightforward to prove your worth in a technical role, this isn’t the case when trying to prove your worth in a leadership role. When you’re working in an innovative environment filled with top performers, ideas, and energy, the ability to facilitate the distillation and analysis of large amounts of information into a usable form that everyone can agree on is extremely valuable. Once you show the team that you can help them make sense out of chaos, you will be taking a large step toward becoming the team leader.
Agile Strategy Distill the reams of technical and business project data into usable information. You will not only add immense value, but you will also gain credibility with the team by performing a difficult task that doesn’t clearly fall under anyone else’s domain.
Alignment and Channeling
Despite a lack of formal authority, the agile project manager must still be able to direct the project and the team. There are still some necessary aspects of the classic, planning-and-control line of attack, but the agile project manager must take a softer approach (see Figure 5-3). Instead of driving compliance to a potentially outdated plan, she must keep the project aligned with the changing project environment. The agile project manager is like an information manifold that takes in technical and business information from many sources, organizes and reconciles it, and then channels it to the appropriate team members and sponsors. I’ve heard many project managers lament that they wish they were making more technical contributions to the project. This is a noble thought, but rather than spending time trying to make technical contributions, or reverting back to the classic project management control methods, you should be tuning up your manifold. The constant change involved in an agile project requires an information manifold that is constantly pulling in new information, digesting it, analyzing it, and distributing it to the right people. This is perhaps the single most valuable contribution an agile project manager can make during the execution phase of a project.