Does a traditional PM role align more closely to a Scrum PO or SM role?
When adapting from an agile to a waterfall environment, often times organizations retrain and shift existing employees to similar roles in the new structure. Some writers like to align a Project Manager with the Product Owner role, while others align them with the Scrum Master. Of course, there won't be a perfect fit because Scrum and PMBOK are two very different management and organizational styles, but there is some overlap in roles and responsibilities.
In my opinion, a traditional Project Manager lies directly between the two roles. I've categorized PMBOK 5th ed.'s 10 Knowlege Areas into the two roles to demonstrate why I feel this way:
PM as a Product Owner
- Scope Management
- Cost Management
- Quality Management
- Procurement Management
- Stakeholder Management
PM as a Scrum Master
- Integration Management
- Time Management
- Human Resource Management
- Communications Management
- Risk Management
I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Interesting question. (Did you mean adapting from waterfall to agile? You wrote the opposite.)
My experience with traditional PMs is typically that they don't do well with the PO roles, which in proper Scrum is about optimizing the value of the Dev Team's efforts, requiring business domain expertise (and optionally technical expertise) that they normally don't have. I don't know what PMBOK has to say about this level of expertise required of a PM. A PM certainly has to deal with gathering and managing scope throughout a waterfall project, but they are not actively defining scope (e.g. requirements and features) - the stakeholders are. Scope is the allowed to change throughout a Scrum project, while it is normally cast in stone in a waterfall project: this can be a tough switch.
Also, many PMs belong to a PMO organization so they are again a generalized resource rather than business experts, and they don't always specialize in software projects. Not that the more enthusiastic or skilled ones can't become POs, of course, but I think it'll be a bigger jump.
PMs would be a quicker fit into an SM role, where they can use their organization, facilitation, and impediment removal skills (at least the good PMs *should* have all of these!). Ex-PMs will likely feel the lack of "control" or "management" inherent in a Scrum team; for example, they might feel they should be the ones with knowledge of the state of a project and report to stakeholders, but it's the POs who own that responsibility.
I think the PM roles are still useful when interfacing to the rest of the organization and beyond, coordinating the various moving pieces that may be required in an overall solution where Scrum is but one piece of a larger whole (say an enterprise software rollout that may require hardware and training). So a transitional or hybrid role encompassing SM and PM roles I think can work as long as each role is conducted properly.
Don't you think that the project management function, which although in some respects is distributed across all three Scrum roles, ought to align principally with the Development Team?
Absolutely Ian!
May I add that, in my opinion when a company want to adapt from waterfall to agile, it must to look to the people and not to the roles? I mean if one were good with people and team, maybe she or he can be a good SM. In the other hand, if one had enough knowledge about the business, she or he could be a great PO.
What do you think?
It's best to consider Scrum roles in their own right, and not as equivalents to old roles which are somehow mapped. Deep change is implied. Hence there is an opportunity to look to the people themselves and their personal qualities.