Inspecting Behavioural Competences of Project Managers and ScrumMasters

Von Karin Kroneder, Ralph Miarka

At Siemens Austria we are determined to improve our project management across all business units. As part of this initiative we train and certify our key Project Managers according to the IPMA Standard. However, the increased rate of change in our markets – and the resulting fast-changing requirements – demand that we look also to agile principles and values for faster delivery of valuable products. We see that some line-managers appoint trained Project Managers to the new role called „ScrumMaster“. In this paper we investigate whether this instinctive procedure can be backed up by the qualification of the Project Manager.
The objective of this paper is to provide you with a stone in the bridge that connects the “classical” project management and agile worlds by discussing some aspects of the compatibility of IPMA and agile values, exemplified by Scrum as the dominant agile framework at the moment. Based on the ICB 3.0, we will select some core behavioural competences of Project Managers and inspect how they relate to those needed by a ScrumMaster. We find that many behavioural competences support the proposed skill-set of a Scrum-Master, e.g. ”Engagement & Motivation” as well as “Values appreciation”. Others, like “Leadership” and “Efficiency”, need to be scrutinized by the Project Manager turned Scrum-Master, up to the point of apparently going against some of the behavioural patterns as described in the ICB 3.0. A Project Manager that turns ScrumMaster without adapting the skill-set would potentially fail in an agile environment.

1. Introduction

Susan is an experienced Project Manager, certified with IPMA Level B. Unfortunately her colleague Sven left the company and Susan’s boss decided that she should take over his project. To handle the risk around uncertain requirements the company decided to manage the project according to Scrum. Motivated and full of energy Susan started to plan the project and initiated her first Scrum meeting.

She prepared the project plans, informed herself about the status, took a look at the documents and spoke with the relevant stakeholders. After the meeting she told me what happened: “I started the meeting with a clear agenda, collected the status and asked about current open issues. Then I told the participants that I now have a clear overview about the project and that I will come back with a structured plan and a defined delegation of the open tasks. After the meeting Gaby, a team member, came to me and told me that the project will definitely fail if I continue in this way. – What is the problem?”

Susan is acting like an experienced Project Manager. She has a concrete vision and can bring it to life by taking over the responsibility, planning the implementation in a structured way and delegating tasks very clearly. She is definitely showing leadership, a particular type that fits less easily into an agile framework.

Leadership is a worthwhile competency a Project Manager should have. In the ICB 3.0 it is the first competency described among the behavioural ones.

Although there are many articles and blog-posts on the work of Project Managers and ScrumMasters, e.g. Loeser, Strickler, Aguanno, Grant and Deemer, we found no comparison of the behavioural competences of a ScrumMaster and Project Manager. Most articles focus only on the differences in tasks. Deemer, for example, provides a guideline on redefining the role of a Project Manager and converting it to the role of a ScrumMaster for a team by listing all the tasks of a Project Manager and identifying the ones in conflict with Scrum. Thus, we will address the similarities and differences of behavioural competences in the roles of an IPMA Project Manager and a ScrumMaster.

Fig. 1: Supporting competences for ScrumMasters

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