Driving an Agile project team

Scrum master (or iteration manager)

The scrum master is responsible for facilitating the team in the Agile practices, and helps the team to achieve the goal of becoming self-organised and highly collaborative.

You may notice that this list excludes the project manager, a supportive role—among others—for Agile projects.

Support roles for the Agile project team

Project manager

The role of a project manager on a mature Agile project changes from a ‘command and control’ leadership style to ‘servant leadership’. A mature Agile team is one that is self-organising: the team works with the business (the product owner) to decide what work is going to be done in the next period (iteration or sprint).

The team also takes responsibility for removing all impediments, making decisions, and solving all problems that are in their sphere of influence. The team will ask the project manager for help where they are not able to do these without assistance.

The project manager on an Agile project is responsible for:

• Removing impediments to the team’s ability to deliver business value.
• Protecting the team from diversions that inhibit the team’s ability to deliver business value.
• Acting as team champion, offering observations from the boundary of the team.
• Outward communications to project stakeholders.

To allow a team to become self-organised, a traditional project manager needs to change from being a supervisor to give the team space to develop. This can be hard for both project managers and project teams, and an Agile coach can help both the team and the project manager to build trust and confidence in each other.

Agile coach

Depending on the maturity of the team, and an organisation, the Agile coach is either a teacher, a mentor or a coach. The Agile coach is responsible for keeping everyone focused on business value, guiding the team in its use of Agile practices, and coaching the team and other stakeholders to deliver high performance.

Project stakeholders

As with any methodology or approach, it’s important to identify all of the project stakeholders, and to understand what role they will have in the project.

Critical stakeholders usually form the project steering committee. Other essential or interested stakeholders may simply need frequent communication as to the project’s progress, or invitations to the regular demonstration of the working product, what is known as the Showcase or Scrum Review Meeting. Other stakeholders may be more actively involved by playing an advising role to the product owner.

Steering committee/project governance

While most Agile projects still have a similar governance structure to traditional projects, the difference is in their involvement in the project. Steering committees on Agile projects need to be active rather than passive, providing timely assistance to the project manager. Progress reports on Agile projects tend to be shorter or non-existent as the project status is always visible and the steering committee can review the work completed by the team on a regular basis.

Note that these are roles, not job titles. One person may fulfil more than one role: for example, the scrum master may be a team member, or may also be the project manager; the project manager may also be the Agile coach. It’s just a case of being able to wear different hats at different times.