Responsible Member for Project Progress to Higher Management

For all of the things to do with the product, stakeholders should talk to the Product Owner. The Product Owner must be empowered by the organisation to communicate about the product. At the beginning of the sprint there is a Sprint Planning meeting where the team estimates what it will do in the sprint. An experienced, empowered, self managing team may be comfortable estimating further into the future but you will need to work towards that, probably. At the end of each sprint, the team has a Sprint Review meeting to which the Product Owner can invite any stakeholders. This meeting is not a 'report' or a hand-off, it is simply a moment for inspecting the progress - the Product Owner should make sure he is completely up to date of the progress all the time.

So really, the business is responsible for keeping an eye on the progress and there are plenty of opportunities for doing so. The Product Owner is the best informed Scrum Team member when it comes to the state of the product and is the person to speak to if wishes change or become clearer.

It is probably a good idea to make sure all of the parties understand their roles before starting out on changing your organisation towards agile software development. The basics are fairly easy to understand but the mindset is very different from traditional businesses.

To add to the above, it is most probable that the Product Owner lacks the basic skills, tools or knowledge required to plan and track the progress of the development project.

In such cases, it is the Scrum master's responsibility to teach the Product Owner how to do it properly (or to make sure the Product Owner has a good coach who can teach him how to do that). Either way, it will not be accomplished overnight...

> Since there is no Role as Project Manager,
> who will be the responsible person to
> communicate the project progress to Higher Management?

In agile practice, those who require information are responsible for getting it. They have a duty to ensure that the information they act on is obtained in a timely fashion and with minimal filtering.

The duty of others is to be transparent so that this information can be elicited.

In short, agile managers will not rely on reports. They will encourage transparency so they can see for themselves.

I agree with Ian however what I have seen is that organization builds and transforms the product development team into a Scrum team but their leadership keep working in the same way.

For such cases PO should take care of progress reporting to leadership while taking help from SM and Dev team. Another option is to have a Line Manager (not part of Scrum team), let him take care of reporting, people, grooming and other stuff.

It is my opinion of course, but I feel strongly that all product/project communication be done by others outside of the development team.

Whether the solution is to push the information out, or have those in need of the data pull that information as needed, the Development Team should be protected from having to work on anything unrelated to the current sprint work. If that requires the SM to get involved, so be it.

The SM's time is much better spent around supporting existing project/product communications, educating the organization on transparency, and working with the PO on such "status" requirements, than the members of the development team.

As per my understanding SM represents management side in the team. PO should be reporting project progress to sponsor/customer etc. whereas SM should inform to management. I agree to Ian's view that "In agile practice, those who require information are responsible for getting it. They have a duty to ensure that the information they act on is obtained in a timely fashion and with minimal filtering.". If NOT then above guideline should be followed.