You may have heard "there's no room for project managers--or any other kind of manager for that matter--in agile." Well, there is. Sort of. The role for managers and project managers is much closer to a form of servant leadership. It's certainly not command-and-control project management. Here are some ideas that may help you move closer to an agile approach for project management.
Ask the project team to explain what their deliverables are to get to the next milestone. Forget this business of assigning people tasks. The people on your team are grownups. You can treat them like grownups. You don't have to--and you shouldn't--assign them work every day. Not only should you not assign them tasks, you should ask them--as a team--to tell you what they have to do to get to the next milestone. Let them
fight it out, ahem, discuss it. The more discussion, the more confidence you have in the schedule.
Use iterative or rolling wave scheduling, so you don't try to create an entire schedule before you know what's going on, or worse, once you realize the original schedule was someone's pipe dream. Once they've reached one milestone, it's time to estimate and plan to get to the next one.
Make people on the team estimate their own work, or, even better, estimate their work as a group. A group's estimates are bound to be better than an individual's, and much better than a manager's estimate. Group estimation is a form of Wideband Delphi, an estimation approach that's been around forever, and works like a champ. When people create their own estimates, they tend to track them, because their estimate is part of their deliverables.
Consider using
timeboxes to help focus people on the work they have to finish now, not the work for later. Timeboxes are a time-honored approach to finishing pieces of work. Use them.
The more you move from command-and-control to guiding/steering the team, the more they will produce. And, the more you practice ideas like these, the more flexible you are as a project manager, which makes your value go way up. And, it's easier to find a job.
