1. www.ijecs.in
International Journal Of Engineering And Computer Science ISSN:2319-7242
Volume 2 Issue 9 September 2013 Page No. 2770-2773
Vakalanka Sai Phani Chandu, IJECS Volume 2 Issue 9 September, 2013 Page No. 2770-2773 Page 1
Paradigm shift for Project Managers in Agile Projects
Vakalanka Sai Phani Chandu, Bharani Manapragada
Member – Education and Research Dept. Infosys Ltd. Mysore, India
chandu4ever@gmail.com
Systems Engineer – Education and Research Dept. Infosys Ltd. Mysore, India
bharani.manapragada@gmail.com
Abstract
IT Managers are always under pressure to meet deadlines and deliver timely results either in form of fully
functional applications or improvements and changes in them. Despite budget slashes and economic
downturns, IT companies must struggle to keep up with the pace of change and continue delivery. A
possible solution to this conundrum is Agile software development methodologies which help IT companies
plan and execute their projects by meeting changing scenarios head on and assuring rapid delivery while
being flexible and maintaining quality.
Keywords :- Project Management, IT Management, eXtreme Programming (XP) and Agile.
Introduction
Agile has several flavors within itself, rather
frameworks, which help in software product
development. eXtremeProgramming (XP), Test
Driven Development and SCRUM are a few to
name. These frameworks use rapid planning and
development cycles throughout the lifecycle of the
project and employ iterative builds,thereby
reducing the cost of change. They aim to deliver
highest value features as early as possible and
then keep incrementing on every delivery for
increased efficiency. XP is one such agile practice
that especially helps in systematic testing by
detecting defects early on in the development
process.
Agile methods in spite of having been proven
successful face many challenges that hinder their
widespread adoption. IT professionals that
advocate the use of Agile claim difficulty in
obtaining the management’s support for its
implementation because Agile changes the way
we look at software development and introduces
several novel roles, processes and artifacts. These
changes when compared to traditional
development methodologies might look daunting
but they have been proven to work exceptionally
well. For instance, XP ‘s salient features such as
test-first design, pair programming, continuous
customer involvement and iterative deliveries may
look bizarre but still help projects deliver
continuous quality oriented results. These Agile
methodologies are more developer and customer
centric than process centric, thereby redefining a
significant part of the management’s role.
Studies from several successful Agile oriented
projects show that strong but minimalistic
management is essential and directly proportional
to the efficiency of agile projects. This
misalignment is symptomatic of a much serious
problem; differences in fundamental assumptions
regarding change, order, control, people and the
overall approach to problem solving.
Organizations and projects that opt for traditional
methodologies assume the following:

2. Vakalanka Sai Phani Chandu, IJECS Volume 2 Issue 9 September, 2013 Page No. 2770-2773 Page 2771
 Rigid procedures are required to be in
place to regulate any kind of change.
 Employees are interchangeable/disposable
‘resources’ in the organization.
 Issues and requests are solved primarily
through reductionist task breakdown and
allocation.
 Order in the project/organization is
maintained by a systematic and static
hierarchy.
 Budgets and risks are adequately predicted
and planned prior to the development and
any changes in it have to be made with due
penalties and necessary documentation.
In such a rigid scenario, it should come as no
surprise that the new methodologies appear so
informal to the point of being random and chaotic.
Because they address various shortcomings in the
rigidly process oriented traditional methodologies,
they’re mistakenly viewed as directionless and as
fostering insubordination. These and several more
are misconceptions that credit to the slow growth
of Agile in the IT industry. Moreover, employing
agile methodologies require additional structure
change to the hierarchy and documentation is
minimalized.
The Problem: Project Manager being a
Taskmaster
Conventional software development
methodologies were first introduced to control and
systematically execute large development projects
along with estimating the budget required and the
risks involved. These methods drew largely from
the principles of management used in construction
and manufacturing industries. Consequently, they
emphasized on the need for predicting the most
important metrics such as money required, risks,
schedules for all the stages of development, etc.
Traditional methodologies such as Waterfall
employ linear development cycles i.e.
requirements lead to design, design leads to
coding and coding leads to testing, so on and
forth. Along with the need for prediction, they
inherited a deterministic, reductionist approach
that breakdowns tasks to address issues.
Traditional models today depend heavily on
stability – stable requirements, design, and
documentation – thereby marking an affiliation
towards compliance to a slavish process as means
of control over the project.
These methodologies were indeed the foundation
blocks upon which software development was
built but present day’s economic trends clubbed
with a rapid pace of evolution make them not so
viable. They add cost and complexity while giving
an illusion that the management is a responsible
body that does exhaustive planning, measuring
and controlling. Over the years huge expenditures
were sunk into projects due to premature
planning. Without iterative development, testing
and continuous feedback from customers which
we’ve come to realize are prerequisites for any
project to succeed, traditional methods face
several threats globally and the results are dull and
blunt – repeated failures with budget overruns and
time slippages.
Also, irrespective of the framework or
methodology used, a project manager is often seen
as a “taskmaster” who is responsible for all phases
of the software development. He/she is also
responsible for controlling the main process that
also documents (often in excruciating amounts of
detail) the tasks, metrics, dependencies and the
resources required to deliver the final version of
the end product. A project manager also monitors
the status of tasks and modifies the project plan as
per requirement.
So, for most IT managers who are comfortable
with the traditional methodologies such as
Waterfall, Spiral etc., the implementation of agile
methodologies can be a scary phenomenon.
However, it need not be so. Studies show that
scaling down the size of project requirements and
teams back to manageable levels ensure more
success. Small teams with agile oriented practices
have been proven successful over the
conventional methodologies with just some
adaptation and a strong dose of leadership.
Problem Analysis
In pursuit of discovering a novel approach that
addresses as many present day constraints as
possible, emerging management principles based
on the new science of complexity have flourished.
These principles exploit understanding of the
autonomous human behavior within the context of
an IT business environment which when
judiciously applied help increase in transparency
and better output from the teams involved.

3. Vakalanka Sai Phani Chandu, IJECS Volume 2 Issue 9 September, 2013 Page No. 2770-2773 Page 2772
While managers discovered traditional
methodologies to control projects and establish
systematic execution, the technical community
gave birth to Agile and its various flavors as a
response to their strong disapproval of traditional
methodologies and the subsequent impact they
have on the team morale and on the end software.
For instance, XP focuses extensively on the
development process of software projects while
leaving the rest to capable managers. As much and
more is said about the efficiency of agile
methodologies, very little has been said about its
management aspects. The implication here is that
the role of a project manager is minimal as XP
teams develop, test and monitor software on their
own but effective. No wonder corporates have
been skeptical of Agile and thereby slow to
embrace them since managers have their own
misconceptions that agile methodologies despise
supervision.
When Agile is adopted for software projects, just
like the core team, a project manager also needs a
set of simple guidelines which help the project to
execute smoothly. These guidelines provide a
framework to the manager within which to
manage processes efficiently rather than following
a rigid set of instructions. Agile processes help
project managers to become adaptive leaders who
can:
 Visualize the goal to the team perfectly
 Establish generative rules of the system in
a simple yet effective way
 Better the team and him/herself by
employing constant feedbacks and later
analyzing them
 Adapt and cause more collaboration
between teams, customer and other
stakeholders
The Solution: Project Manager as a Leader
The best project managers are never just
organizers, they hold a variety skill sets and are
responsible for every aspect of the project. With
good communication skills they articulate
requirements and drive teams toward their goals,
with good management skills and being tech-
savvy, they plan, coordinate and execute the entire
project thereby transforming a vision to value.
Primary tasks include overseeing requirements
gathering, maintaining a profitable relationship
between all stakeholders and operating efficiently
under various constraints all of which require
strong proficiency in the field and good personal
skills. While this has always been the case with
every project manager, agile project management
places a higher premium on their leadership skills
more than anything else. For instancein
eXtremeProgramming, teams are responsible for
creating and monitoring their documents and
execution plans by collaborating with the
customers. The customer elicits the requirements
as features and prioritizes them according the
business value, then the development team divides
the tasks amongst themselves and measures
progress after each iteration i.e. a time-boxed
development cycle that realizes a set of features.
The customer and the development team
collaborate extensively over the project’s lifecycle
making any suitable changes to the project plan.
So far, since the above scenario does not seem to
require a role or a job for the Project Manager,
where does the manager fit in? The answer to this
is in the statement: Every project needs a leader.
Agile practices free the manager from the grind of
having to be a taskmaster and allow him to focus
on being a leader. A leader by definition is
someone who aims at leading himself and his/her
team to a preset goal with maximum efficiency. In
an agile project, the manager must keep the
spotlight on the end-product, inspire the team,
promote teamwork and collaboration, meet
obstacles head on, remove obstacles for progress’s
sake, and do much more! Rather than being an
operations and logistics controller who follows the
rulebook, a project manager in an agile project has
the chance to be an adaptive leader who can use
his intuitive abilities to steer the project toward
better performance.
Upon general categorization there are three basic
performance requirements that every project
manager must meet:
 Good knowledge about various tools,
techniques and processes. Knowing how
and when to use them.
 Performance – It is just not sufficient for a
manager to be learned. He/she must also
deliver quality software and enable the
teams under him/her to do the same
 Personal Skills –Because it is crucial for a
manager to pay attention to what motivates

4. Vakalanka Sai Phani Chandu, IJECS Volume 2 Issue 9 September, 2013 Page No. 2770-2773 Page 2773
a team and be a good leader that can serve
as an inspiration for teams to thrive
Having said so, agile methodologies and its
concepts are really not all that different from those
of a traditional method and have many similarities
with it. One must still define the project, plan the
project in quantifiable units, initiate and execute
it, monitor it throughout and control the results. It
is the manner in which the above tasks are done is
where Agile differs from the conventional models.
Agile managers here play a vital role in
understanding the old methods and retro-fitting
their salient features into this new world of
development.
A few of the many advantages that a project
manager skilled at implementing agile practices
can bring to a project are:
 An intrinsic ability of the development
team to deal with change
 A view of the organization as transparent
and adaptive to changing trends
 Shifting focus from rigid managerial
control to intelligent control that allows
teams to self-organize based on individual
strengths
An Agile Project Management Framework
The Agile manifesto states:
 Individuals and interactions over processes
and tools
 Working software over comprehensive
documentation
 Customer collaboration over contract
negotiation
 Responding to change over following a
plan
That is, while the words on the right are extremely
important, they are not as important as the words
on the left. During the course of the project,
planning sessions are shown to be a fertile ground
for developing common understanding between
different stakeholders in the project and fostering
respect for one another. Sadly, transparent and
effective communication is also one cause for
project failures therefore Agile boasts of highest
customer involvement. Agile processes are very
simple and effective by that making sure everyone
in the team speaks their mind, concise summaries
are made and immediate solutions are arrived at to
any problem faced by a stakeholder. Agile also
has various software tools that help managers
track their projects better. The project manager
has a right to intervene and he must always be
open to utilizing every opportunity to strengthen
the team from the outside and know the team
better like for instance organizing team lunches
and assigning due credit to team members
whenever possible.
Conclusion:
A team that laughs and coexists harmoniously
works better than a team that doesn’t. The lack of
effective guidance for project managers in agile
development projects has been a big void in the IT
community over the past few years. The stark
contrast between the distinct realms of agile
development and other methodologies’
development also renders many managers clueless
about their actual roles in their projects. Building
and fostering a successful team by ensuring
maximum quality in the end product is a complex
job of any project manager that requires
flexibility, creativity and attention to the unique
elements. We believe that by adopting Agile and
customizing it to address any set of project
requirements, project managers will not only
enjoy the success of achieving the end product
with the best numbers but the journey along the
way.
References
1. http://agilemanifesto.org/
2. http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com
3. http://blog.standishgroup.com/project-
management
4. Teaching agile project management to the
PMI, Author: Griffiths .M, from Agile
Conference, 2005. Proceedings, Print
ISBN: 0-7695-2487-7 INSPEC Accession
Number: 8834459 Digital Object Identifier
:10.1109/ADC.2005.45
5. Construction Extension to A Guide to the
Project Management Body of Knowledge
(PMBOK®Guide)http://marketplace.pmi.o
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00101388701