The Agile Commander: Project Manager or Scrum Master?

While Scrum and Agile are becoming common tools in the high tech and application development industry, there’s a lack of education about the role of the Project manager and Scrum master in Scrum. Learning about these roles will enable us to work more effectively with the agile development teams. Although both the roles are pretty different, they are meant to work collaboratively with each other not against each other.

Let us learn more about the roles and responsibilities of the Project manager and Scrum master in agile development environment.

Who is Project Manager?

A Project Manager is a professional in the field of project management. They have the responsibility of the planning, execution, resource management, and discipline pertaining to the successful completion of a specific project or objective. 

Responsibilities of a Project Manager:

The project manager is accountable for ensuring that everyone on the team knows and executes his or her role, feels empowered and supported in the role. The specific responsibilities of the Project Manager may vary depending on the industry, the company size, the company maturity, and the company culture. However, there are some responsibilities that are common to all Project Managers,

• Develop the plan of the project
• Co-ordination among  project stakeholders
• Enable Communication
• Managing the project risk and schedule
• Managing the allocated budget
• Managing the project delivery

What is Scrum?

Scrum is the way of introducing Agility into a project, due to its simplicity and flexibility. Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development framework for managing product development.

Scrum is the most popular approach to agile software development. With this approach, any adjustment the development team makes to any aspect of the project is based on experience, not theory.

A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their requirements at various instances (often called "requirements churn"), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner.

Who is Scrum Master?

Scrum is facilitated by a Scrum Master, who is responsible for removing impediments to the knack of the team to deliver the product goals and deliverables. The Scrum Master is not a long-established team lead or project manager, but acts as a shield between the team and any distracting influences. The Scrum Master ensures that the Scrum process is used as anticipated. Scrum Masters started as positions and evolved to roles as we became more Agile mature. The Scrum Master is the enforcer of the rules of Scrum, often chairs key meetings, and challenges the team to progress.

The Scrum Master differs from a project manager in that the concluding may have people management responsibilities dissimilar to the role of Scrum Master. In fact, there is no role of project manager in Scrum at all, because none is needed. The habitual responsibilities of a project manager have been divided up and reassigned among the three Scrum roles, and mostly to the Development Team and the Product Owner, rather than to the Scrum Master.

Responsibilities of Scrum Master

The Scrum Master focuses on the improvement process and mentors the Scrum team. The key responsibilities of the scrum master are:

• Maintains and removes impediments
• Manages the Scrum process, making the process work
• Campaign the release
• Strategize the Sprints
• Shields the team from peripheral interfaces
• Facilitates Scrum meetings as requested
• Ensures crystal clear statement among everyone involved in the project.

The main cause of the contest is not based on scrum master versus project manager responsibilities but based on our elementary characterization of a project.

In the product development world, project managers play a significant position in the successful execution and release of projects/products to market or the customers.

The project manager and the scrum master are meant to work collaboratively with each other not against each other.

Happy delivery!

About Author:

Gurpreet Kaur Gaga is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at: gurpreetkaur.gaga@spluspl.com