Who on your Scrum Team should Perform these Core Project Management Functions?
You’ve convinced your bosses to let you introduce Agile Scrum into your company and you’ve picked your pilot project. You gathered your team, trained them, you’ve enlisted an enthusiastic Product Owner, and now you are ready to rock.
As you get a couple of Sprints under your belt, you begin to realize some Project Management functions that were performed by a PM in the waterfall world may still be needed. What are they and who performs them now that you’re Agile?
- Financial Reporting: How much will this feature set cost?
- Risk Management: Who tracks risks and issues?
- Documentation: Do we still need documentation and if so, who writes it?
Here at GSD Mindset, we have some practical ideas on how to approach this.
Financial Reporting
There are very few organizations that give you a pile of money and tell you to go have fun. Today, most companies want an accounting of how funds have been allocated. In the waterfall world, Project Managers report out the status of the monthly budget, using techniques like Earned Value to calculate where you are in relation to money spent.
Now that you’re Agile, good Project Management dictates that you still need to keep a financial accounting. In fact, many companies require careful accounting as a legal requirement. It’s not so hard to track and forecast expenses when you transition to Scrum.
After a few Sprints, you use Velocity to determine how many Story Points you can complete in a Sprint. If you know your monthly team budget, you can also calculate the average cost per Story Point. Multiply that cost to the estimated Story Points for the remaining Stories in your backlog for each Feature or Epic and now you have a rough idea of the amount of funding required to complete the remainder of the project.
Keeping on top of the financials will go a long way toward keeping management happy.
Who should track financials? Since calculating cost is similar to calculating Velocity, we believe this is a task best performed by the Scrum Master.
Risk Management
With Scrum, you should have less risk, because you deliver more frequently to customers, but that does not mean you can quit tracking and analyzing risk when you transition to Scrum. There are many ways to identify and track risks now that you are Agile. I find MindTools article on Risk Analysis and Risk Management helpful.
Risk analysis and assessment should be a team effort. The Scrum Master should lead the discussion during Sprint Planning and conduct a quick checkup at Standup half-way through the Sprint.
Check out our blog post Reduce Risk on a Scrum Team for more ideas.
Documentation
Most software folks are loathe to create documentation. This goes for writing User Guides and Specs all the way down to including Comments in lines of code. Documentation is an important tool to help future users understand what it’s all about. Documentation is a necessary Evil for those of us who remain in a world where our projects are audited. Even in Scrum, we follow a process and our implementation of that process may be audited.
The level of documentation should be decided at the beginning of the project. There are many tools to help you decide and document the minimal amount of documentation your project should require. Many companies today have Project Management Offices (PMOs), and they provide either written guidance or a tool for capturing this list. The final list of necessary documentation should be a part of your Definition of Done.
Once you’ve determined what needs to be written, you need to figure out who’s going to write it. Writing documentation is the responsibility of the entire team. The task to write or update documents should be included as part of the the Story. Because Stories are small changes to functionality, the level of documentation for each Story will be small compared to the size of documents completed at the end of large waterfall projects.
Hopefully, these ideas will help you figure out how best to tackle other traditional project management tasks that may be missing from your Scrum Team practices. Remember, it’s all about teamwork, team empowerment, and team accountability, so figure this out together as a team.
For more advice on how to transition more traditional project management roles, I recommend our blog post Agile Teams Still Need Traditional Support.
Gerri Slama Grove
Gerri Slama Grove
GerriG@gsd.guru