The story goes that when one of the original MTV VJs was being interviewed she was trying to get her head around the concept.
“It’s like the radio but it’s on TV.”
That made sense. Except she wanted to know “What do I do while the records are playing?” In retrospect this is funny but we have to remember she was looking at it through the lens she understood. If you have never seen a music video, you don’t know what is going to be on the screen.
This story resonates with me while I grapple with the challenge of evolving from a traditional “command and control” Project Manager into an agile leader. Like the evolution from radio to video, this is a radical shift.
Project Management roles within a team are distributed. Nobody needs to assign tasks because the team takes tasks themselves. A project manager doesn’t need to schedule in scrum because the team takes two weeks (or whatever your agreed time-frame is) into a sprint and that’s what is delivered. The Project Manager no longer needs to worry about what to deliver because the Product Owner determines the desired outcome and the team decides the solution.
So a simplistic answer is “we don’t need Project Managers any more”. Or the more nuanced, “Project Managers schedule outside of the team, dependencies across teams.” A better answer for me is that they evolve into agile leaders. Either way, it is a major shift in thinking and it is reasonable to expect people to be confused and to need some time.