I must admit that I’m a fairly rabid agilist. Part of the rationale for that is the pain I’ve experienced in leveraging traditional PM techniques in software projects. Another influence is my experience dealing with traditional leadership and the dysfunction relating to driving projects and teams towards unrealistic goals.

What’s interesting though is a conversation I had with our Scrum Master team the other day. I asked them to act more like “traditional project managers”. To begin to—

• be more prescriptive at times with their teams; demanding high quality, excellent software, and adherence to our agile principles
• pay close attention to risks – planning, real-time surfacing and guiding team reactions
• encourage the teams to improve at an accelerated rate; to set the bar high for improvement
• become visible as leaders and spokespersons for their teams; to do a better job of socializing state & progress