Can Your Project Manager / Agile Coach / Scrum Master Confidently Demonstrate the Main Business Flow of Your App?

From my observation, only a tiny percentage could.

Image credit: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/facebook-smartphone-application-3317378/

Today, I saw a Twitter video by Jason Fried, co-founder of 37 Signals and co-author of the Rework series, demonstrating his company's new group chat product. This triggered me to think: “How many project managers you have worked with were able to walk through the main workflow of the app?”

Please note that we are talking about “Project Managers” (also including “Agile Coaches” and “Scrum Masters”) who are a part of the development team. If CEOs such as Steve Jobs and Jason Fried could do the job, it would not be a big task for a project manager, right? After all, “ShowCase” is an Agile Concept.

The more depressing fact is that while those managers or software architects were unable to walk through the app, they usually were comfortable demonstrating many JIRA features, such as sprint planning, sprint board, epic, estimating user story points, burn charts, retrospectives, …, etc. Isn’t that quite sad? Jira is not their app; it is Atlassian’s.

There is no excuse for this behaviour.

Table of Contents:
· Why is that?
∘ Human Factors
∘ Technical Factors
· The Solution for Motivated Managers

Why is that?

If a behaviour is common, even if it is obvious nonsense, there must be reasons behind it. We need to think from those people’s (project manager, software architect, agile coach, scrum master) perspectives.

Human Factors

1. Managers and Architects prefer non-change knowledge across projects

To software managers, ideally, all software projects are managed in an identical manner. This way, they don’t need to learn. It is quite natural.

The current project is possibly just one of a dozen projects within a manager’s decade-long tenure. The decision is evidently clear: invest time in comprehending the intricate details of each business feature or mechanically adhere to the universal so-called “Agile Ceremonies”.

2. Managers and Architects prefer abstract

Have you heard of the term “Astronaut Architect” from Joel Spolsky?