If You're Agile, You Don't Need Project Managers

If the title of this article caught your attention, you know what I’m talking about. With the outsized rise of “agility,” it’s easy to find every kind of implementation showing a total lack of understanding of organizational dynamics. It’s not for nothing that someone once said 80% of implementations of one of the most popular agile methods (Scrum) were garbage. Still, the fact that these kinds of aberrations happen forces us to think critically and ask ourselves: what could actually be going on here?

Project Management = Bureaucracy

Agility is a mindset, a “new” paradigm that puts the individual first, letting them interact and contribute the value of their knowledge, experience, and skill.

“Traditional” project management isn’t opposed to, or against, collaboration. Originally, 50 years ago, project management leaned on the then-prevailing paradigm of advance planning, and out of that came what many uninformed people call Modern Project Management. That’s changed substantially over the years.

Just as “Agility” isn’t necessarily Chaos and Anarchy, “Project Management” isn’t, by default, Bureaucracy and Inefficiency.

When Do You Actually Need Project Managers?

During a really pleasant conversation with my friend Elena, she brought up, half-joking, one of those cases where a company decides, for the wrong reason, to fire all or nearly all of its project managers under the excuse “we’re agile, we don’t need project managers.”

Beyond the laughs and the anecdotes about how that company reached that decision, and later walked it back - like most of them do - it’s worth sharing a few important considerations about what might actually be going on.

1. The Nature of the Production Process

The first and most important thing is taking the time to validate the nature of the challenges and the environment the project manager works in. You need to understand the difference between complex adaptive environments and highly predictable ones.

It’s key to answer this question based on reality, not wishful thinking. We often wish we could predict a project’s outcome and have a foolproof plan, but imagine you’re running the campaign for a presidential candidate in your country.

• How predictable can the campaign plan really be?
• To what extent can you predict how your opponent is going to respond?
• What key topics might come up during the debates?
• Could you predict a natural disaster that might change your candidate’s message?
• Is it even feasible to anticipate how potential voters will respond to one topic or another?

Sometimes what we wish for and reality aren’t the same thing. If you want to understand a bit more about the nature of production processes, I’d invite you to look into Ralph Stacey’s Complexity Model and Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Framework.

2. The Scale of the Production Process

Another factor to consider is scale. No matter how much you want to avoid intermediation, sometimes it’s more than necessary. Imagine the President of a large corporation with no Vice Presidents or Directors. Does that make sense? Isn’t a Board of Directors (BoD) itself a potentially agile cell or team? Isn’t a BoD autonomous and self-organized?

Nearly every agile method, including the wonderful Scrum, struggles at scale. They inevitably require intermediation and stronger horizontal, vertical, and cross-cutting communication.

The central question here is: who takes on the coordination, communication, and control work toward corporate governance if you eliminate the project manager position? How are controls supposed to be managed? What happens to the interaction between product and service vendors and teams that aren’t 100% autonomous and depend on third parties? What happens to the interaction between operations and projects?

3. Available Talent

This is a delicate subject, and often we need to honestly assess whether the people on our teams actually have the professional maturity to manage themselves. I truly believe every individual has the capacity to self-manage, the same way every human being has the capacity to be good and honest - but unfortunately, that’s not always how it plays out. We call that: free will.

Sometimes, getting talent to operate “in auto mode” (self-managed, self-organized, and self-regulated) requires leading a deep organizational and cultural transformation. Big-Bang solutions, like firing an entire unit or a large group of employees, end up being costly for morale and for the transformation itself.

Regardless of the paradigm, talent always requires assessment and a plan to reach high performance.

Conclusion

Eliminating a position within an organization is possible, as long as it’s been properly assessed and justified. I can’t deny that, just as there are terrible “agile” implementations out there, there are also plenty of PMOs that have limited themselves to creating processes and templates (often useless ones) that only reinforce a lack of trust and an inability to work as a team.

The point is to always assess the true nature of the production process behind your projects, in order to determine the ideal management strategy, along with the maturity of your people, in order to build high-performing teams.