Unlocking the Value of Project Management in Agile
In today’s agile organizations, it’s easy to overlook the role of project management. Scrum doesn’t define one. SAFe barely mentions it. But for senior leaders responsible for delivering outcomes, not just software, the role of project management remains critical.
Project managers are essential in agile environments, especially in large enterprises where complexity, regulation, and accountability still matter. The best PMs don’t just manage tasks. They enable agile success. They facilitate delivery, navigate enterprise processes, and orchestrate across teams. They protect and shield agile teams from unnecessary distractions while enabling agile practices that drive execution, transparency, and value to deliver business outcomes.
Where the PM Fits in Agile
In smaller agile organizations, the Product Owner (PO) often absorbs many project management responsibilities. But in larger enterprises with complex systems, risk oversight, and regulatory pressure, the need for dedicated project management becomes clear.
When done right, project managers protect agile teams and enable agile practices by facilitating delivery, navigating enterprise complexity, and orchestrating across teams to realize business outcomes.
Why is the PM Role Not Included in Agile Frameworks?
One frequent question about the role of the PM in Agile is why the PM role is not defined in scrum or SAFe or other agile frameworks. The answer is simply that project management is not the focus of these agile topics. Content defining or describing Scrum and SAFe (just sticking with these examples) tells how software gets built with a focus on the development process. There is no mention of project managers in the description of these agile planning and development methodologies because they are not talking about every aspect of overall solution delivery. There is also no mention of vendor management, legal, cybersecurity, finance, or accounting roles, but no one is suggesting that these functions are not needed in an agile ecosystem.
The Value of Project Management
In traditional waterfall projects, the PM leads the effort, documenting requirements, leading design sessions, managing scope, adhering to a schedule, and tracking cost. They are the overall voice of the initiative.
In an agile environment the PM role is very different. Now the PM is not leading the parade but is playing a servant leadership role helping others in their roles to build the solution and realize business outcomes. Instead of enforcing a fixed schedule, the PM partners with others to shape a schedule that emerges and evolves over time.
PMs can enable agile practices and the realization of business outcomes by facilitating delivery, navigating the enterprise, and orchestrating across teams. The PM role protects agile teams while enabling agile success. Let’s explore these ideas.
#1 Facilitate
Rather than driving a rigid schedule, the PM works with others to shape a timeline that evolves with the team’s capacity and priorities. This usually involves multiple releases of new capabilities as they get built as part of ongoing development of the next most valuable features. The schedule will emerge over time and will evolve as the PO and scrum team(s) work through quarterly PI planning and/or sprint planning as part of normal agile or scaled agile practices.
But more than just capturing the emerging schedule in an agile environment, the PM facilitates the delivery of the solution through Five Guiding Principles:
Well Defined Roles & Responsibilities – ensures that all participants have a clear understanding of the expectations of all project team members and the work they are accountable for
Stakeholder Engagement – ensures everyone with a role or interest in the project is engaged and informed over the life of the effort including impacted business areas, technology and data governance, cybersecurity, 1st Line of Defense (1LoD) risk management, 2nd Line of Defense (2LoD) risk review and challenge oversight, 3rd Line of Defense (3LoD) audit examination, etc.
Disciplined & Repeatable Processes – drives sound delivery practices consistent with documented standards and guidelines including project governance, financial management, accounting practices, vendor management, legal review, contracts, etc.
Full Transparency – provides clear and consistent reporting on the progress of the work, manages risks and issues, and never sugar-coats the message or masks concerns; knows that asking for help is a sign of strength and escalates where needed to mitigate risks and resolve issues
Continuous Improvement – leverages feedback loops including sprint retrospectives, interim lessons learned, feedback from governance and oversight, interviews, and survey responses to make ongoing adjustments based on the insights provided
These principles help PMs set expectations and manage work that might otherwise distract agile teams.
Additionally, there are many more considerations to delivering the intended business outcomes than building software. Achieving benefits often requires more than software—it demands process changes, user adoption, and behavior reinforcement. This human side of project success and change requires focused attention to achieve the expected business outcomes.
Organizational Change Management
Planning for organizational change management (OCM) is another area where the PM role is essential. While the PM may not be accountable for communication, training, process change, or ongoing reinforcement, the PM helps ensure these tasks are planned alongside solution development and delivery. Extending disciplined planning and execution oversight into business led communication, training, and adoption reinforcement is frequently critical to benefits realization and project success.
While the PM role in an agile environment may not be leading the effort the way a traditional PM in a waterfall environment might, wrapping project management practices around the most important work facilitates delivery and makes it easier for everyone involved by setting expectations, operating with discipline, protecting the development teams from distractions, and ensuring all the activities outside of software development are planned and executed to maximize project success and benefits realization.
#2 Navigate
In many organizations, agile teams operate within a larger corporate structure that requires adherence to certain processes and governance. The project manager plays a vital role in navigating these corporate requirements, ensuring compliance while shielding the scrum team and balancing the flexibility of agile practice.
For example, while agile teams may prioritize rapid iteration and feedback, the PM ensures that these iterations still comply with necessary approvals, audits, and other corporate requirements. This balance is essential for maintaining the integrity of both the agile process and the organization's documented standards and controls.
This critical navigation role for PMs enables various corporate or enterprise processes including project financial reporting, forecasting, resource management, expense accruals and re-classes, capitalization, architecture review, data governance, cybersecurity requirements, vendor management office, contracts, and legal review, risk engagement and oversight, compliance review, user experience and accessibility review, new product committee review, audit and regulatory review, and other important corporate processes.
Servant Leadership
While a Product Owner or some other role might be able to track and ensure these corporate processes are followed, the project manager’s role is specifically intended to build the relationships needed to track and manage navigating these complex processes to ensure the work follows the required path. The best PMs exhibit servant leadership with strong emotional intelligence, interpersonal and communication skills, and an ability to navigate political complexities that could complicate the team’s overall success. This type of leadership allows them to build strong relationships with the various organizations and teams across the enterprise. The PM can leverage these relationships to mitigate risk, solve problems, keep the work on track, follow required enterprise process steps, and adhere to corporate policies and standards.
#3 Orchestrate
In more complex organizations or when building more advanced solutions, the work to deliver the full project scope or even just a simpler initial set of MVP features may require the involvement of multiple scrum teams, release trains, or departments. This often creates complex dependencies or timing considerations that need to be identified, tracked, and managed.
A core value of the project management role is the ability to leverage relationships and collaborate across teams to proactively mitigate risks, partner to resolve issues, and to track and manage dependencies that if left alone might create confusion, delays, or re-work.
The value of project management practices and the PM orchestration function can be seen in various ways:
Dependency Management - These might be development and testing dependencies between technology teams, systems, or external vendors. Identifying dependencies early helps PMs prevent delays, reduce risk, and keep teams moving. The PM makes sure everyone knows what’s coming next and who is waiting for something to keep work flowing smoothly. Finally, the PM partners with POs and others to prioritize tasks based on their dependencies, ensuring that the critical path is clear, and that work is sequenced effectively to optimize the workflow across teams.
Alignment with Business Goals - The PM bridges the gap between the strategic objectives of the business, the outcomes documented in the Business Case, and the technical execution by the development team. They reinforce the business goals and target outcomes for the project team and partner with the PO to ensure the work aligns with the overall business strategy. If the scope of work evolves over time (as Agile embraces change), the PM gets project governance approval on a Scope Change Request, works with business owners to update the Business Case to ensure ongoing alignment, and maintains continuous engagement with business stakeholders to ensure that their needs are being met.
Cross-Functional Collaboration - The PM fosters a culture of collaboration by ensuring that business, technology, and corporate teams are working together effectively. This might involve acting as the proxy for technology interests, facilitating cross-functional meetings, mitigating risks, resolving conflicts, and ensuring that all stakeholders are aligned on project objectives.
Resource Allocation - The PM plays a crucial role in ensuring that needed capacity (internal staff, contingent workers, professional services resources, externals vendors, etc.) is allocated efficiently across teams. By understanding the effort of the work and the resource demand the PM can partner with resource managers to ensure that resource needs are anticipated and allocated to achieve project goals.
Transparency & Communication - The PM provides full transparency and communication, ensuring that information flows seamlessly between development teams, business sponsors, and corporate stakeholders. This central communication role prevents misunderstandings, reduces silos, and ensures that everyone has the information they need to make informed decisions. The PM builds trust through consistent updates and clear visibility into project health.
The project manager’s role orchestrating across teams adds significant value in an agile environment by helping to keep everyone aligned, informed, and working together to meet project objectives, achieve business outcomes, and deliver business value.
#4 Protect
The “Protector” Project Manager concept reframes the traditional project manager role in agile environments. In this model, the PM role is not as a taskmaster or controller but acts as a guardian of delivery conditions that allow teams to succeed.
The Protector Project Manager ensures that agile teams have the clarity, support, and environment they need to deliver value effectively without overstepping into team ownership or product authority. The PM acts as a buffer between executive pressures, corporate processes, and the agile cadence.
In an agile environment, the PM clears the path for delivery and actively removes impediments that the team cannot resolve alone. The PM role enables collaboration without dictating how the scrum team works. They ensure that sprint goals align with overall project scope and business milestones without disrupting agile delivery flow. The “Protector PM” fosters an environment where the team can surface risks, try experiments, and raise concerns without fear and encourages transparency regarding progress challenges.
The Protector Project Manager helps organizations get the discipline of project delivery without crushing the autonomy and adaptability of agile teams.
This role is especially valuable in hybrid environments or companies with strong corporate processes where agile teams must coordinate dependencies, navigate budget cycles, or meet compliance expectations.
AI and the Future of Project Management
As AI becomes more prominent across all roles, the project management role will be impacted as well. In the next 5-10 years Gartner estimates that nearly 80% of traditional PM tasks (e.g., resource management, forecasting, reporting, data entry) are projected to be mostly automated with these advancements.
Tomorrow’s project managers augmented with AI assistants will be less focused on data entry and reporting and more on orchestrating cross-functional collaboration, mitigating risks, and ensuring project work aligns with business priorities. Their value will lie in turning AI insights into human decisions that drive innovation and results.
These changes further support the concept of the servant leadership role of project management in an agile environment. The future of project management isn’t about replacing human expertise with AI, it’s about enhancing it. PMs who proactively embrace AI, understand its capabilities, and position themselves as strategic enablers will more effectively use modernized practices and optimized workflows to improve their success protecting agile teams and facilitating, navigating, and orchestrating to deliver business outcomes.
Summary
For most companies, the journey toward agile and scaled agile adoption is an ongoing process. There will be process changes, organizational changes, evolving roles, new data, new tools, and many lessons learned. Embracing agile principles that focus on iteration, innovation, collaboration, and relentless continuous improvement will allow project managers to thrive in an agile environment. Showing up as servant leaders who facilitate delivery, navigate the enterprise, and orchestrate across teams while avoiding outdated command and control behaviors, project managers demonstrate their value and strengthen agile outcomes.
Project managers aren't just surviving in agile environments. They're becoming essential catalysts for enterprise agility. PMs who embrace their evolving AI-enabled role create the conditions for agile success and ensure business goals are met.
The most successful companies recognize this complementary relationship where Agile provides the adaptive framework for delivery, and modern project management ensures that framework connects meaningfully to enterprise realities. The PM role isn’t disappearing. It’s evolving. The question isn't whether project managers belong in agile environments, but how quickly can organizations evolve the PM role to maximize both agility and enterprise value.
