THE AGILE PROJECT MANAGER COMPETENCIES DEMANDED BY INDUSTRIES

THE INCREASINGLY DYNAMIC AND COMPLEX WORLD OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT HAS SEEN THE RISE OF AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT (APM) AS AN INCREASINGLY ATTRACTIVE APPROACH FOR MOST INDUSTRIES.

APM is a mindset and cultural shift, defined and guided by shared values and self-managing team principles. APM is a collaborative approach of people, tools, and processes.

It can include methodologies such as Scrum and extreme programming (XP). Compared to a traditional ‘waterfall’ approach, APM has a 28% higher success rate, allows a 37% faster timeto-market and a 16% higher productivity rate.

Organisations in Australia and globally are increasingly recruiting project managers to implement APM methods, manage and lead Agile teams, and complete projects successfully. Therefore, Agile Project Managers (AgPM) must understand and expand their diverse set of competencies to successfully manage this approach. In the Agile Project Guide of PMI (2017), the role and competency requirements for the AgPM is unclear. Thus, this prompted our investigation into the competency requirements of AgPM.

THE AGILE PROJECT MANAGER JOB MARKET IN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND

Our study identified and collected 254 AgPM job advertisements from Seek.com Australia and New Zealand (NZ) from June-October 2020 (75% Australia and 25% NZ). The majority of these advertisements (75%) were from major Australian and NZ cities such as Sydney (33%), Melbourne (17%), and Auckland (11%). Additionally, they represented industries such as ICT (26%), banking, finance and insurance (19%), and government (12%) sectors.

Many of these jobs (25%) expect potential applicants to have some ICT project experience. Some specify a minimum of 3-8 years of experience as an AgPM or Scrum master. About a third of the AgPM jobs are contractual and temporary (3-12 months). Nearly 20% of the jobs specify a salary range for a full-time position (AU$90-150K). For temporary contract positions, the salary range is AU$800-$1000 per day (without superannuation). About 20% of the jobs require a specific STEM-related tertiary degree as part of a qualification to apply for the job. Also, nearly 20% of jobs sought specific certifications such as Certified Scrum Master (CSM).

MARKET DEMAND FOR AgPM COMPETENCIES

Using an integrated APM and traditional project management competency framework, we identified 36 competencies categorised under personal, workplace, and agile professional competencies. We rank order criticality of market demand of competencies and describe the top 10 of these competencies with examples.

TOP 10 HIGHLY DEMANDED COMPETENCIES

Competency 1: Teamwork

The majority of AgPM jobs (84%) require teamwork-related competencies. For example, AgPM should:

• ‘support and manage a team in a tough environment’

• ‘be a team player’

• ‘facilitate, mentor, or coach a team around the goals of agile’

• ‘assist the team in building planning’

• ‘motivate teams to set directions and continuously increase its performance’

• ‘inspire to develop a congenial team culture’

• ‘remove obstacles and ensure an environment where a team member can contribute across the project work’

Competency 2: Facilitate end-to-end Scrum execution

Nearly 63% of jobs require competence in leading end-to-end execution of Scrum ceremonies and practices. Specifically, AgPM require competencies to ‘monitor Sprint progress daily’, ‘taking proactive measures when required to achieve Sprint deadlines and objectives’, ‘ensure the work should be ready to hand to a customer’, ‘conduct sprint review and retrospectives’, and ‘select another list of the product backlog and begin working again’.

Competency 3: Agile framework competency

Around 58% of the jobs require competencies in frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, Lean, Jira, Confluence, and/or XP. Competencies need AgPM to ‘understand’, ‘experience’, ‘be familiar’, ‘have excellent knowledge and proven experience’ of the Scrum framework, including all artifacts, techniques, cadence, and tools like Jira and Confluence.

Competency 4: Stakeholder management and alignment

About 50% job advertisements demanded skills to manage stakeholders in Agile projects (Scrum team, the product owner, end-user, the client, and organisational units). Stakeholder competencies include:

• ‘managing stakeholders and their competing priorities’

• ‘aligning stakeholders into one team’

• ‘engaging stakeholders throughout the agile process’

• ‘conducting training sessions on the benefits of Lean and Agile’

• ‘negotiate with stakeholders to protect the team from external influences impacting their ability to meet agreed goals’

Competency 5: Effective communication

Nearly 48% of jobs demanded effective communication skills for AgPM. For AgPM, having high verbal, written, and presentation communication, workshop facilitation, and interpersonal skills are indispensable. Importantly, AgPM should implement agile ways of communication such as ‘to ensure the right information is recorded, reported, and distributed in the correct format and through appropriate communication channels, to the right people, and in a timely manner’.

Competency 6: Continuous improvement (CI)

In total, 39% of jobs demand CI-related knowledge, skills, and ability to drive, support, and implement a CI culture and initiatives both within teams and across the organisation. AgPM should’ be passionate about CI and champion ongoing process improvement initiatives to implement best practices for Agile project management’, ‘take responsibility to lead the team for CI initiatives’, ‘use CI techniques to remove bottlenecks and drive performance’, ‘challenge the standard in the organisations processes and procedures to drive CI.

Overview of Agile Project Manager job market.

(Source Kamrul Ahsan and Marcus Ho)

Competency 7: Understanding of Agile principals

All together, 32% of AgPM jobs demand an understanding of Agile methodologies and principals. AgPMs require a demonstrable level of understanding of Agile methods and principles to guide, facilitate, and support the team to work on Agile. Methodological knowledge of Agile approaches, ‘including but not limited to Scrum, Kanban, TOC, and project management techniques’ is imperative. AgPMs entail ‘expertlevel knowledge of Scrum’, should have a ‘track record of introducing Agile methodologies’, and ‘demonstrable experience to introduce and drive Agile methodologies and processes’.

Competency 8: Cross-functional focus

About 29% of jobs require ‘cross-functional focus’ competencies. Competency attributes under this category include ‘successful ability to work closely with all management levels of an organisation’ and experience in ‘developing and maintaining strong work relationships across cross-functional units to identify cross-functional dependencies and risks’. AgPMs remove dependencies on specialists/ individuals team members, and thereby reduces threats to timely product delivery.

Competency 9: Work with the product owner to maintain a backlog

AgPM jobs (28%) require competencies to facilitate product owner (or ‘customer representative’) in ‘refining, grooming, and maintaining’ product backlog (ordered list of all project work). AgPM competencies also include the ability to ‘drive the sequencing of the squad(s) to ensure that there is sufficient work flowing from the backlog into discovery’, assist the product owner ‘to plan delivery based on the selected approach and available team capacity’.

Competency 10: Leadership

Around 26% of job advertisements required Agile-focused leadership skills to ‘foster a continuous improvement culture’ and ‘resolve impediments’, ‘coach and mentor’ and ‘mobilise and motivate’ the agile team to ‘set direction’ and ‘to achieve the project goal’. AgPMs should have the ability to work as ‘servant leader’ or to work as a facilitator with ‘excellent adaptive team leadership capabilities’.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF AgPM COMPETENCIES FOR APM

The results of our study demonstrate the evolving role of project managers in APM. AgPMs are increasingly playing multiple roles, including the leader, motivator, problem solver, and facilitator, signifying the need to diversify and expand their competencies. These competencies will become increasingly in demand as more organisations adopt APM. Additionally, these competencies can help AgPMs and organisations refine and develop competencies for personal and organisational improvements. For example, in recruitment, selection, performance management, and training and development.

Authors: Kamrul Ahsan, Associate Professor, Department of Supply Chain and Logistics Management, College of Business and Law, RMIT University, Australia and Marcus Ho, Senior Lecturer of Human Resource Management, Faculty of Business and Law, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand.