The future is not bright if you want to stay as a project manager. The smart money is on making the transition from project manager to product owner. With a disciplined team working in an agile manner, I can see all of their status and work planned in a system like Jira, which shows what is happening on the roadmap and the team solve risks, impediments and blockers themselves
by Mark McKee, 7 April 2022
Every time I see someone announcing on LinkedIn that they have acquired a PMP or related qualification, my heart sinks for them.
The role of a project manager worked fine in the industrial age when things were more linear and people worked in a waterfall manner; meaning they were generally expecting to be cajoled into giving their project manager unrealistic dates for things they didn’t have much certainty or confidence about, and then reported back as cast-iron forecasts slotted into a Gantt chart that nobody really believed. In my experience, project managers track and report and put their findings into slide decks that hardly anyone reads. They often (but not always) have the unfortunate situation of a shallow or non-existent level of domain knowledge in the teams they are tracking. This gets worse with the majority of programme managers I have met as the scale of their ignorance increases over many ‘projects’ that they have to oversee and report on. Obviously, some people who actually do have domain knowledge become PMs, as that seems like a way to go up the corporate ladder.
In the digital age this is no longer the case. Jira, Rally and other information radiating tools replace the need for a person to be tracking the work of teams they are not part of. A colleague recently told me he had replaced a project manager with a JQL query on the Jira system. It made me laugh because it rang so true. The digital age is wiping out previously safe roles as technology clears out inefficiency. This is not me celebrating. I’m simply relating the truth of what is happening today so as you can take steps to make yourself relevant in the digital age, so please read on…
Arise, product owner!
What teams really need in order to be as productive as possible are product owners. This is something I bang on about a lot for those who know me. This is the role of the future. With domain knowledge and an understanding of customers, you can enable teams to share in the vision for the future and work with them to ensure epics and user stories have clarity and well understood acceptance criteria. Managing a backlog is a key to success for product development in the digital age – no more requirements documents that rarely get signed off, never mind read! A stakeholder need only review and prioritise the stories for the next two to four weeks, which is a fairly quick decision-making discussion.
The digital age is about flow efficiency – that is, reducing hand-offs and wait time. The quicker that work can be represented in well-formed user stories, agreed with the stakeholder and then estimated by the team, the priorities are clear, as set by the product owner, and the team can get to work on what is of most business value. A set of goals are agreed for the sprint and the work done is demonstrated at the end of the sprint. What could be more motivating to be part of than that? Goodbye PMP, hello PO!
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