Goa State, India, Lifting the load: Martin Harris

Project Management Offices really serve no purpose in scrum. You are either a product owner, (not a manager), scrum master (not a manager either) or your in the team, (no technical leaders here either). So what about all that useful controlling and reporting stuff they used to do?

• Program management functions should be moved into the team.
• Team support comes from Agile coaches, or scrum masters.  They are not managers, they guide and do not tell the team what to do.
• Responsibilities of release, budget, tracking reporting etc, are the Product Owners domain, once again the Product Owner is not a manager.

Its a bad idea to keep the PMO and attempt to re-brand it under Scrum.  Keeping the unit and asking people to be scrum masters is a recipe for disaster.  Its hard to change team culture over to scrum.  Teams find it a big challenge to throw off the old and become self directed.  If you have your old manager coming to your team the roles stay right where they were.  So if you want to keep members of the PMO and they are technical, make them part of the team or remove them from the process.

Educate the Fake Scrum Master

Along similar lines, have you met a Fake Scrum Master? Its common for an organisation to take existing managers and ask them to be scrum masters.  Often with little or no training, rarely assigning mentors.  Its a very difficult thing to do, to change within your own organisation.  Michael Watkins exposes this as a potential area of failure for new leaders in his book the first 90 days.  A manager is typecast by his existing interactions within an organisation, so being promoted within his existing unit to a more strategic role is possibly one of the hardest things for a manager to do.  So moving from the role of manager to one of coach, mentor and guide with the same people is nigh on impossible.  People just put you back where you were despite your best efforts.  Its a big ask turning a team self directed, its tempting as a manager to tell the team how to do it.  So you see the paradox.

To help you spot a Fake Scrum Master, think Cargo Cult Programming but with a process slant.  These are typical behavior characteristics.

• Produces the Sprint Backlog on their own.
• Decides how long the tasks will take.
• Assigns tasks to people.
• Chases around the team (outside the scrum) requesting status updates.
• Takes on the role of co-ordination with other teams where dependencies lie.
• Takes the heat when the pressure is on.  What a hero!

All these things the team should do.  Those tasks teach, pressure and form the team into an efficient unit.

Things you can do with project managers to help them transition

Get external help.  Find good, skilled facilitators who can come in and pair with the new scrum master.  They should help with the new meeting formats, show how to guide instead of manage, and jump on any of the fake symptoms.  Its not always the scrum masters fault but a facilitator will be able to spot when the relationship is reverting to type and break it up.  If you recruit facilitators to the organisation you can often share them amongst projects.  Let them move around the teams from week to week and be on hand if anyone wants “emergency support”.  Sometimes its important to get something resolved before it develops into a habit.  Remember, support not control.

Other signs that your project managing

• Sprint lengths are project lengths.
• Teams are broken up people moved around frequently.  Teams need to change but give them time to settle and grow.  Only change individuals infrequently, keep the team.
• You have a matrix structure in software development.  It was an idea to reduce load on managers, no longer needed if the team shares the work.
• Scrum managers are shared.  How could a genuine scrum manager have the time.

So save some cash and spend it on facilitation and budget for development.  Disband the PMO, give people support and new scrum roles.