8 ms·

Why an Agile Project Manager is Not a Scrum Master

21 points by iliastsagklis 14y ago

jph98 14y ago
Yawn!
stayhungry 14y ago
Read the title and tell me that Agile vs. Scrum vs. whatever isn't the new buzzword-laden bureaucracy. All that time you're spending talking about how your going to do things and what names you are going to call each other is an unnecessary distraction from the doing of things. Leave me and my team out.
- rjsamson 14y ago
  Agreed. When you're spending as much time dealing with the methodology governing a project as you are actually doing something, something is wrong.
alexro 14y ago
The whole agile methodology is so abused nowadays that old waterfall approach looks like kidding in comparison.
tferris 14y ago
Scrum, Agile, all overrated buzz words. This project management evangelists will never understand that methodologies won't make things happen. Motivation drives people. Not daily scrums, agile, obscure names or roles. Motivation comes through great people, a MVP mindset and none existant project managers, no methodology and just some basic tools like group chat, Github and whiteboards.
- alinajaf 14y ago
  In an all technical team, sure. But any time you have to interface with normals, tools like Scrum are often the only thing standing between you and "That page that gets their facebook photos and creates a PDF collage out of them will only take you a few hours right?"
  - tferris 14y ago
    Scrum as an interface?? You are talking about good specifications/good requirements. For precise requirements I don't need Scrum or any other esoteric methodology. I just need some people who are able express themselves precisely, clearly and who can put their specifications in some tool and maintain a proper dialogue with devs (i.e. Pivotal). They don't need weird names, roles and daily standups. Scrum is heavy routine which actually wears people out and invented by people who desperately want to upvalue their shitty projectmanagement job. The key is: just try to keep people out of your project and company who have absolutely no clue about tech/Internet/online.
    - gouranga 14y ago
      I'd hire you in a flash. You were hit with the clue stick at birth!
      - Arelius 14y ago
        Let's be honest, the clue stick beatings probabally came later in life.
    - alinajaf 14y ago
      > i.e. Pivotal OK, so what you call Pivotal, I call Scrum. > The key is: just try to keep people out of your project and company who have absolutely no clue about tech/Internet/online. I'll try, thanks. As I said with non-technical people, some sort of process (call it what you like) helps.
  - gouranga 14y ago
    The normals should be talking to you rather than sending you crap. Its your opportunity to make sure their brains have been translated properly.
    - alinajaf 14y ago
      This comment sounds exactly like the sort of thing you would read in an 'Agile Project Management' book. I think it's just fashionable to rail against agile now, when we've already incorporated all of the good stuff into our processes as though it were the way we always worked.
- gouranga 14y ago
  I sort of agree. I recommend the following: Use a kanban chart (don't be tempted to do it in JIRA or some other atrocity), fire all the meddling project trolls, fire any crap developers, fire your outsourcing company, get a DVCS in, drown your business analysts in the toilets, buy middle management ipads and send them to Starbucks, talk to your customers, write shit. That is all. No magic project management unicorn shit required.
- gcb 14y ago
  But it doesn't help to use the wrong names for things. everytime i move teams at bigcorp, which recently mandated agile, i have to figure out what waterfall artifact got each scrum name. It's madness.
parfe 14y ago
I was confused how Agile made it back to HN, but after a quick glance the reason is clear. Enterprise Java has discovered Agile.
- gouranga 14y ago
  Enterprise java these days is like Germany after the wall came down I.e. A much better place. agile is still Auschwitz.
  - wwosik 14y ago
    Sorry, but that analogy is disgusting.
    - gouranga 14y ago
      Just a FYI, I've been to Auschwitz personally, had two relatives starve to death there as children (much worse than getting gassed if you ask me) under Soviet control in Jan '45 and three survive. TBH the two who are still alive laugh about it and pull their trousers down to Germans regularly in Koln where they live. Getting the trousers up again is quite hard in your late 80's... Please don't be disgusted for other people who are perfectly capable of handling it. Most of the crap you here is from the 1% of vocal people on the subject. The others think it was a dark time, but shit happens (yes really bad shit but there you go). (I've also suffered 5 years of agile).
cageface 14y ago
I came here to post a grumpy dismissal of all this tinplated ritual but I'm happy to see that every poster in this thread has beaten me to it. Good engineers are instantly suspicious of this kind of ceremony because it's almost always an excuse for an insecure project manager to draw enough attention to him/herself to justify the office and salary. Certifications with vaguely mystical Eastern sounding names count -2x.
gouranga 14y ago
An agile project manager is the stupidest concept ever. A lean process requires no ceremonial positions, bean counters or project trolls. If you have an agile project manager, welcome to extreme waterfall programming. Note: this is from experience of watching lots of people fuck up the whole agile thing miserably in the following way: http://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/ http://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/
- slantyyz 14y ago
  I liked this quote from the article: > Explain that velocity is not a productivity metric Velocity isn't always about productivity. Sometimes it's about survival. I worked in a startup (making enterprise software) right after the first bubble, and the company "practiced" its own version of scrum. We had a small runway and small sales, and the development team insisted on setting its own pace. The fact that we had to have stuff to sell to make money for our paycheques didn't seem to matter to development. Needless to say, I managed to get the hell out of Dodge before the bank accounts went empty, but a good chunk of the dev team stuck around, plodding for months without pay. It took months before the dev team realized no more money (including backpay) was coming and most of the remaining people finally left. With no major release to sell. If velocity is required to make development a financially sustainable effort, it can't be dismissed outright.
epoxyhockey 14y ago
I quit my last job on account of them moving to an agile process, but not before my company had spent thousands of dollars being trained on the process. Snake oil.
leothekim 14y ago
Sounds like most of the commenters here would subscribe to this philosophy: http://programming-motherfucker.com/ http://programming-motherfucker.com/ Myself included.
Tomis02 14y ago
My natural barf reflex was triggered by seeing both 'Agile' and 'Scrum master' in the same sentence. Thanks for upvoting guys.
MattRogish 14y ago
"Agile Project Manager"? That's a no-op. A non sequitur. "Agile", in my opinion, is really about the following things (tactically, not philosophically, cuz we all know "people over processes" etc.): * Don't churn requirements * Ship quality software One could probably argue that the first probably is a necessity of the second (how can you ship anything of quality if the requirements are shifting under your feet?) but let's keep them separate. "Don't churn requirements" -> keep tasks small. don't change your mind 1000 times a week. keep tactical horizons short (e.g. don't estimate long-range). "Ship quality software" -> automated tests. code reviews/pair programming. just-in-time lightweight specs. integrated business users, design, ux, qa with development. retrospectives/kaizen.

21 points by iliastsagklis 14y ago

jph98 14y ago

Yawn!

Read the title and tell me that Agile vs. Scrum vs. whatever isn't the new buzzword-laden bureaucracy. All that time you're spending talking about how your going to do things and what names you are going to call each other is an unnecessary distraction from the doing of things. Leave me and my team out.

rjsamson 14y ago
Agreed. When you're spending as much time dealing with the methodology governing a project as you are actually doing something, something is wrong.

alexro 14y ago

The whole agile methodology is so abused nowadays that old waterfall approach looks like kidding in comparison.

tferris 14y ago

Scrum, Agile, all overrated buzz words. This project management evangelists will never understand that methodologies won't make things happen. Motivation drives people. Not daily scrums, agile, obscure names or roles. Motivation comes through great people, a MVP mindset and none existant project managers, no methodology and just some basic tools like group chat, Github and whiteboards.

alinajaf 14y ago
In an all technical team, sure. But any time you have to interface with normals, tools like Scrum are often the only thing standing between you and "That page that gets their facebook photos and creates a PDF collage out of them will only take you a few hours right?"
- tferris 14y ago
  Scrum as an interface?? You are talking about good specifications/good requirements. For precise requirements I don't need Scrum or any other esoteric methodology. I just need some people who are able express themselves precisely, clearly and who can put their specifications in some tool and maintain a proper dialogue with devs (i.e. Pivotal). They don't need weird names, roles and daily standups. Scrum is heavy routine which actually wears people out and invented by people who desperately want to upvalue their shitty projectmanagement job. The key is: just try to keep people out of your project and company who have absolutely no clue about tech/Internet/online.
  - gouranga 14y ago
    I'd hire you in a flash. You were hit with the clue stick at birth!
    - Arelius 14y ago
      Let's be honest, the clue stick beatings probabally came later in life.
  - alinajaf 14y ago
    > i.e. Pivotal OK, so what you call Pivotal, I call Scrum. > The key is: just try to keep people out of your project and company who have absolutely no clue about tech/Internet/online. I'll try, thanks. As I said with non-technical people, some sort of process (call it what you like) helps.
- gouranga 14y ago
  The normals should be talking to you rather than sending you crap. Its your opportunity to make sure their brains have been translated properly.
  - alinajaf 14y ago
    This comment sounds exactly like the sort of thing you would read in an 'Agile Project Management' book. I think it's just fashionable to rail against agile now, when we've already incorporated all of the good stuff into our processes as though it were the way we always worked.
gouranga 14y ago
I sort of agree. I recommend the following: Use a kanban chart (don't be tempted to do it in JIRA or some other atrocity), fire all the meddling project trolls, fire any crap developers, fire your outsourcing company, get a DVCS in, drown your business analysts in the toilets, buy middle management ipads and send them to Starbucks, talk to your customers, write shit. That is all. No magic project management unicorn shit required.
gcb 14y ago
But it doesn't help to use the wrong names for things. everytime i move teams at bigcorp, which recently mandated agile, i have to figure out what waterfall artifact got each scrum name. It's madness.

parfe 14y ago

I was confused how Agile made it back to HN, but after a quick glance the reason is clear. Enterprise Java has discovered Agile.

gouranga 14y ago
Enterprise java these days is like Germany after the wall came down I.e. A much better place. agile is still Auschwitz.
- wwosik 14y ago
  Sorry, but that analogy is disgusting.
  - gouranga 14y ago
    Just a FYI, I've been to Auschwitz personally, had two relatives starve to death there as children (much worse than getting gassed if you ask me) under Soviet control in Jan '45 and three survive. TBH the two who are still alive laugh about it and pull their trousers down to Germans regularly in Koln where they live. Getting the trousers up again is quite hard in your late 80's... Please don't be disgusted for other people who are perfectly capable of handling it. Most of the crap you here is from the 1% of vocal people on the subject. The others think it was a dark time, but shit happens (yes really bad shit but there you go). (I've also suffered 5 years of agile).

cageface 14y ago

I came here to post a grumpy dismissal of all this tinplated ritual but I'm happy to see that every poster in this thread has beaten me to it. Good engineers are instantly suspicious of this kind of ceremony because it's almost always an excuse for an insecure project manager to draw enough attention to him/herself to justify the office and salary. Certifications with vaguely mystical Eastern sounding names count -2x.

gouranga 14y ago

An agile project manager is the stupidest concept ever. A lean process requires no ceremonial positions, bean counters or project trolls. If you have an agile project manager, welcome to extreme waterfall programming. Note: this is from experience of watching lots of people fuck up the whole agile thing miserably in the following way: http://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/ http://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/

slantyyz 14y ago
I liked this quote from the article: > Explain that velocity is not a productivity metric Velocity isn't always about productivity. Sometimes it's about survival. I worked in a startup (making enterprise software) right after the first bubble, and the company "practiced" its own version of scrum. We had a small runway and small sales, and the development team insisted on setting its own pace. The fact that we had to have stuff to sell to make money for our paycheques didn't seem to matter to development. Needless to say, I managed to get the hell out of Dodge before the bank accounts went empty, but a good chunk of the dev team stuck around, plodding for months without pay. It took months before the dev team realized no more money (including backpay) was coming and most of the remaining people finally left. With no major release to sell. If velocity is required to make development a financially sustainable effort, it can't be dismissed outright.

epoxyhockey 14y ago

I quit my last job on account of them moving to an agile process, but not before my company had spent thousands of dollars being trained on the process. Snake oil.

leothekim 14y ago

Sounds like most of the commenters here would subscribe to this philosophy: http://programming-motherfucker.com/ http://programming-motherfucker.com/ Myself included.

Tomis02 14y ago

My natural barf reflex was triggered by seeing both 'Agile' and 'Scrum master' in the same sentence. Thanks for upvoting guys.

MattRogish 14y ago

"Agile Project Manager"? That's a no-op. A non sequitur. "Agile", in my opinion, is really about the following things (tactically, not philosophically, cuz we all know "people over processes" etc.): * Don't churn requirements * Ship quality software One could probably argue that the first probably is a necessity of the second (how can you ship anything of quality if the requirements are shifting under your feet?) but let's keep them separate. "Don't churn requirements" -> keep tasks small. don't change your mind 1000 times a week. keep tactical horizons short (e.g. don't estimate long-range). "Ship quality software" -> automated tests. code reviews/pair programming. just-in-time lightweight specs. integrated business users, design, ux, qa with development. retrospectives/kaizen.