The bottom is, Agile does not use Project Managers! But, speaking from experience. Project managers will come back when things do not get done.
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Several posts here from people talking out of their bu##s, with no clue how things actually work.
sCrum masters = setup multi meetings where zero gets accomplished. Examples, tell me what you did today, scrum retro what did you do. You ask a scrum master to help and they throw it back in the requestors face, or say that's not in their job profile. Basically they are paid to put on the calendar anywhere from 30min-2hr of meetings a day, yell at people for not entering burn down hours, they contribute exactly zero. Not bad for an hour of work.
Product DOwners = a person who knows exactly zero about a project. Their only use is entering user stories they get from others, but they do it slow and take days to do it. If you asked them any details about the goal or what they're even trying to accomplish, guess what you find out they're as dumb as a rock. They simply ask the team to give them the Features, user stories, tasks etc and they input them. They have no insights, no knowledge, notta zip. Only thing they have is a ego instilled from the job title product owner.
Project Manager = other company's i've been at a PM was extremely knowledgeable, really truly own the project, own it end to end, the real deal. Here they just ask others to update a colored slide, they expend zero effort, have no deep thought. There job is to tell the manager they work for how great they are and to annoy real workers with meetings to update their slides.
Product Owners actually do the real work. Product Managers just look over our shoulders all week long. Scrm Masters also do a lot, as opposed to Project Mangers who schedule meetings.
Ideally, PM roles are split in two. Scrum masters become the meeting and box checkers as a discipline and the product owners advocate for the customer and write the user stories.
They should do an assesment and place people into the roles they best fit. It works well once you maje the move but if you cannot do either: bye
Project Managers in WIMT are absolutely useless, no hyperbole.
The tech manager owning an app I was implementing was pushing the PM team to come through with guidance dealing with a difficult business partner, He was told by the PM team they were not there to "manage" the project that was the tech teams job and that the PM was there to, paraphrasing, check the boxes.
What you do at Initech is you take the specifications from the customer and bring them down to the software engineers?
All this criticism and not one answer to the question asked. Yeah just let the developers do what ever they want is the answer. Bottom line is the move to Agile by technology negates the need for PMs when the organization is also moving to the one PM concept. Some areas of WF have always had a single PM managing the tech and business change involved but many had a tech PM AND a business PM on every project. Business PMs are now taking on the tech change mgmt into their projects. PMs I know in tech are being offered scrum master, delivery manager and even product owner roles in Agile. Not all are capable of it nor do all want to take on one of those rolls so they are leaving on their won. Will a layoff be at the end of the tunnel after this voluntary movement plays out? Go on the BONY Mellon layoff page and see for your self.
Different companies give project managers different powers. In defense and construction industries, the project manager is king because they control all of the money. They are the one who decides who can charge to their project. At Wells, AU managers control all of the money, therefore they have all of the power and PMs have no real power.
I hope the product owners get some decent project management training. They are difrent disciplines and use different tools. The PM -type objectives for execution would help product managers enormously.
hope so! As others have stated, haven't come across any PM's here worth their salt. They're not adding any value to the projects, merely checking on status. That should be whoever owns the project or is on their teams responsibility.
Project managers at wells are the most useless I have ever encountered.
All they can do is maintain a BS excel sheet to ‘track progress’ so that they can report everything is on time to management
@yal so funny/true. I got forced into being a product owner for an application I supported. Would bang my head on my desk daily with all the tasks I had to complete and it kept me from supporting the actual app...
Let's hope they lay off both Project Mangers and Product Owners, they harbor the absolute laziest, dumbest, most worthless, annoying, meeting time s—s, the universe has every created. Their only existence is to give managers hand-obs and go around annoying those who actually do work for deck info for a clueless management. I put them on the same level as Agile headcount, absolutely 100% worthless, so worthless they eat into others time with bogus meetings and extract what ever energy and momentum a team has and flushes it like a Starbucks coffee enigma.