The Project Manager's Guide to Mastering Agile, 2nd Edition

17Distributed Project Management in Agile

THERE’S A COMMON MISCONCEPTION THAT PROJECT MANAGEMENT IS NOT CONSISTENT WITH AGILE. A contributing factor to that misconception is that there is normally no one called a “Project Manager” at the team level in an Agile project and the conventional view of project management requires a designated Project Manager. There is actually a lot of project management going on in an Agile project, even though you may not find anyone with the title of “Project Manager.”

• It’s a different kind of project management with an emphasis on maximizing business value rather than the classical plan‐driven project management emphasis of providing predictability on costs and schedules for delivering well‐defined requirements.
• The functions that might normally be performed by a single person called a “Project Manager” have been distributed among the different members of the Agile team.

For many people, there is a strong stereotype that “project management” is something that is only done by a “Project Manager” and that is not necessarily the case anymore.

WHAT IS DISTRIBUTED PROJECT MANAGEMENT ?

In an Agile environment, there may be no single person called a “Project Manager” and there is a good reason for that:

• In a classical plan‐driven project, there is an emphasis on planning and control. There is also typically somewhat of a contractual relationship with the client to deliver a solution within an approved cost and schedule. In that kind of environment, ...