by After Carl Marnewick's “Project Management is Dead” post we had lots of comments and conversations across the various online channels and email questioning the claim that project management for software development projects is dead.
The replies to our statement centered on the following arguments:
- Project Management is needed as the the value chain that needs to be managed is larger than just the activity of the construction of working software.
- Large corporates have governance processes that you want to shield your development teams from and would necessitate at Project Manager.
- There are many activities across various development teams that necessitates some type of co-ordination.
- If the typical PMBOK/Prince 2 Project Management style is not appropriate for development teams, then we should look at Agile Project Management.
I think that arguments 1, 2 & 3 have some validity but are context sensitive and influenced by the environment one operates in. These arguments are strong in highly bureaucratic organizations but may be less so in more entrepreneurial environments.
The question to be asked is: Is this classical project management or some type of administration function? The same holds for the co-coordination across teams. It is a vital role but is it classical project management?
Argument 4 is more subtle and my personal view is that the concept of project management in an agile world is almost a non sequitur. If the concept of a project does not exist in an agile world then why do we name something Agile Project Management? It seems to me that adaption of general project management in an agile world is holding onto what was rather than embracing the cultural and process revolution necessary to establish what is coming to be.
Project Managers are often domain experts and in many cases form the solid middle management core in large organizations.
Even if the role of project management is changing it would be foolish to think that the people historically playing the Project Manager role have no value. In these new methods there are many roles that could, and in some cases even should, be executed by people with strong domain and co-ordination skills. Release Train Engineers, Iteration Managers, Value Stream Engineers, etc. are all roles that spring to mind depending on your method.
All the responses we had were from Project Managers, what does the technical community think? Is there value in classical project management? Let us know at hello@langerman.co.za.
