Transitioning from a Traditional Project Manager to an Agile Project Manager
If you’ve been managing projects for a while, you may not understand how an agile project works, or your role in it. If you’re accustomed to predicting the schedule, assigning the work, and tracking a Gantt chart, you may be puzzled by how to use empirical data to know the project’s progress, having people self-assign work, and by your new role as coach and facilitator. Without a Gantt chart, you may be perplexed and not know how to answer your management’s question, “When will you be done?”
Agile projects provide the project manager (and any other manager) more useful information than a serial life cycle project. Yet, it’s difficult for many project managers to make the transition to Agile, because they don’t know what they can or should do.
We’ll discuss how to organize a project and how to collect the data--both quantitative and qualitative--that tells you how the project and the team are progressing. We’ll discuss the project manager’s role in facilitating the team’s work and performing risk management. You will learn what to measure and how to explain to management when you will be done.
About Johanna Rothman
Johanna Rothman helps managers and leaders solve problems and seize opportunities.
She consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. She enables managers, teams, and organizations to become more effective by applying her pragmatic approaches to the issues of project management, risk management, and people management.
Johanna writes two blogs: Managing Product Development and Hiring Technical People. She is the author of:
- Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects.
- 2008 Jolt Productivity award winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
- Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby)
- Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People
Find more of Johanna's articles and her blogs at www.jrothman.com.
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