Use Servant Leadership concept to improve PM management flexibility
When it comes to agile project management, it is impossible to apply all agile techniques in Taiwan or Greater China. However, I believe that the agile spirit and some management techniques can be used in traditional project techniques to a certain extent. The most common method is the Stand up meeting of Daily Scrum, and the management technology that the author focuses on this time is the concept of Servant Leadership proposed by PMI in the Agile Practice Guide. The author's personal understanding of Servant Leadership is to limit the business content of PM to the establishment and maintenance of Product Owner, Scrum Master, and PMO. Therefore, this Case Study focuses on project management with the above-mentioned concept of Servant Leadership as the core.
The reason why we hope to introduce the concept of Servant Leadership is that today's projects have increasingly higher and detailed technical division of labor requirements for the project execution team. In the past, PMs were promoted from members of the project team who were outstanding in a certain field and were interested in project management. However, today's project management technology itself is a set of professional fields that require specialization. In addition, the knowledge field of each project is also very specialized. Therefore, the author believes that the future talent market's expectations for project PMs will tend to have project management technical experience; and there is no requirement for technical expertise and experience in the project itself.
In this way, the organization's assignment of PMs is no longer limited by the technical expertise of the project itself, and can make more flexible assignments of project content. The author guesses that this is also PMI's original intention when setting up the job role of PM, that is, there is no need to know the content of the project domain, as long as you have PM capabilities, you can manage the project well. However, experienced project executors know that this is very difficult to implement in practice. The main reason is that if the PM does not understand the content of technical expertise, he will not be able to integrate the technical expertise required for the project and master the project process and issues.
The author believes that PMI advocates that "PM is a technical profession" and does not require a deep understanding of the project to be executed and technical expertise. The method is to apply the agile spirit in the Agile Practice Guide and emphasize the importance of self-coordination and integration among Agile team members. And using Scrum Master as the prototype, the concept of Servant Leadership is proposed. The work of "project function integration" is supplemented by "strengthening team member work coordination". The PM uses the integrated management knowledge area of PMP and the strengthened communication skills of Scrum Master, allowing the PM to get rid of dependence on the professional knowledge area of the project.
In this case study, the author conducted project operations based on this concept. The background of the project being executed is that the members of the Scrum Team focus on the scope of their personal functional areas. Most members have less cross-functional status and are not informed of the need to collaborate across functional areas. The author emphasizes that the main roles and responsibilities of servant leadership in the team are Product Owner and Scrum Master.
The author agrees with this concept of treating PM as an independent function, so in this Case Study of servant leadership practice, I learned that this approach has the following problems (but not the problems encountered in this project):
1. Loss of leadership authority
Servant and leader are contradictory words literally, and can easily be understood as "lead by a servant". In traditional projects, if the leader claims to be a Servant, the team may understand that it does not need to be bound by the leader. And despise the authority of the Servant Leader.
2. Difficulty in requiring coordination between functional areas
The key to agile management is Self-organize and Cross-Function, but in most projects the situation is like an island, especially when you can't finish your own things, you won't consider others. As a result, the functional integration that the team is expected to perform cannot be performed.
3. Leader’s professional ability requirements
The leader's authority often comes from experience and knowledge in the project field rather than project management capabilities. Just imagine, when a project member encounters an Issue, the Leader is not only unable to assist, but instead spends time trying to understand the content of the Issue. It will be difficult to establish leadership.
The above three problems, except for the first one, are actually due to the fact that project management concepts in Taiwan and around the world have not yet introduced the spirit of agile management. As for the first leadership issue, we have to go back to the most basic discussion of leadership in management. The author believes that people who are willing and recognized as PMs themselves have a certain degree of charisma, and this is the focus of leadership.
The author believes that it is not only in the field of project management, but also in various fields of management knowledge. Whenever new tools and methods emerge, they will face implementation difficulties. The difficulty is simply that the new tool is inconsistent with the existing environment or the new tool itself has no practical value (the author and many foreign arguments believe that agile management is the former). Therefore, the prerequisite for operation is that the managed organizational environment must first recognize the value of new tools and methods and be willing to practice them.
In the future project management market, it is certain that the professional division of labor of members within a project will become more and more specialized and refined; the trend of professionalization of the professional capabilities of project management is also certain. Under this trend, the author believes that only the concept of Servant leadership proposed by PMI can solve the problem of PM shortage. However, the solution does not only require the PM to have the spirit of agile management; it requires all teams to have the spirit and tacit understanding of agile management. Recently, many companies and teams have advocated the transformation of management methods; facing this era of professional division of labor and rapid changes in demand. Should the company's IT management methods also consider transforming to agile thinking?
refer to:
Servant leadership: https://www.pmi.org/…/servant-leadership-cures-organization…
Scrum Guide (the most important core concepts of agile):
https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html
Agile Manifesto
http://agilemanifesto.org/
