The responsibility of Scrum Master is making sure that the rituals of Scrum are followed properly. (Makes sure there is a Retrospective. Keeps the meetings short.) Scrum Master does not care about the business case.
Project Manager is managing the business case, making project plans, drawing Gantt charts, identifying project risks—shortly, managing the project. (Scrum Master is managing the process.)
These two roles are coming from different—mutually incompatible—paradigms.
The closest analogy to Project Manager in Scrum methodology would be the Product Owner, who specifies what needs to be done and decides priorities. Scrum Master and Product Owner are two different people. (Often working for two different organizations, as Product Owner is the representative of the customer.)
In Scrum (as defined in Scrum textbooks) managers simply do not exist. And it’s not because they were rebranded to Scrum Masters. It’s because the team is organized differently, it is autonomous, and communicates directly with the customer. Which was the entire point of doing Scrum in the first place.
Many companies, sadly, keep doing the traditional project management, only using JIRA, with lower managers renamed to scrum masters, long frequent meetings renamed to agile stand-ups (where no one actually stands, because their feet would hurt), etc. And they call it Scrum, and congratulate themselves for being agile.
Okay, sure then, we were terrible at agile. Shrug? I don’t really care about what you call it. We were agile-ish, we called me the scrum master, but really my job was to make sure everything got done, was sequenced correctly, right people did the right work, etc.. I know people have some big opinions in the space of how to manage projects correctly, but my take is mostly do whatever works for your people and company to get stuff shipped. If we weren’t really agile so be it.
Using what works for you is perfectly fine. Redefining new words to mean “business as usual” makes it difficult to communicate the original idea. (In this case, the idea of developers making the decisions autonomously, without having managers. Which is what Scrum-by-the-textbook is, in a nutshell.)
No.
The responsibility of Scrum Master is making sure that the rituals of Scrum are followed properly. (Makes sure there is a Retrospective. Keeps the meetings short.) Scrum Master does not care about the business case.
Project Manager is managing the business case, making project plans, drawing Gantt charts, identifying project risks—shortly, managing the project. (Scrum Master is managing the process.)
These two roles are coming from different—mutually incompatible—paradigms.
The closest analogy to Project Manager in Scrum methodology would be the Product Owner, who specifies what needs to be done and decides priorities. Scrum Master and Product Owner are two different people. (Often working for two different organizations, as Product Owner is the representative of the customer.)
In Scrum (as defined in Scrum textbooks) managers simply do not exist. And it’s not because they were rebranded to Scrum Masters. It’s because the team is organized differently, it is autonomous, and communicates directly with the customer. Which was the entire point of doing Scrum in the first place.
Many companies, sadly, keep doing the traditional project management, only using JIRA, with lower managers renamed to scrum masters, long frequent meetings renamed to agile stand-ups (where no one actually stands, because their feet would hurt), etc. And they call it Scrum, and congratulate themselves for being agile.
Okay, sure then, we were terrible at agile. Shrug? I don’t really care about what you call it. We were agile-ish, we called me the scrum master, but really my job was to make sure everything got done, was sequenced correctly, right people did the right work, etc.. I know people have some big opinions in the space of how to manage projects correctly, but my take is mostly do whatever works for your people and company to get stuff shipped. If we weren’t really agile so be it.
Using what works for you is perfectly fine. Redefining new words to mean “business as usual” makes it difficult to communicate the original idea. (In this case, the idea of developers making the decisions autonomously, without having managers. Which is what Scrum-by-the-textbook is, in a nutshell.)
Thank you for doing the work of correcting this usage; precision in language matters.