The role of the Project Manager is different from traditional projects is a way that in Smart projects the main task of the Project Manager is to facilitate the team. That is, he or she reports to the customer, organizes kick- offs, workshops and retrospectives, runs the daily stand-up meetings, makes sure the development, test, acceptance and production environments are operating, takes care of hand-over and monitors the progress of the project, supported by the agile dashboard and the burn down charts.
Obviously, The Project Manager has to take care of giving transparancy about the approach, timeline and progress to the customer. If the customer has any need to see control on the project, the Project Manager is the one he talks to.
Hardly any project runs "in solitude", creating the ever present need to manage dependancies, like:
- the customer should have qualified testers available at date x
- the customer should have his validation test set for final acceptance ready at date x
- the customer must make sure that the data, that is fed to the new system, is ready for a first import, in format abc.xml at date x
- etc.
This is managed by the Project Manager. To make this sort of "combined content/process" management possible, the Project Manager works with the team to define a "planning logic", the order in which building blocks are realised. For instance: To show a first working version of software with some user-rights we need: - developed software
- imported user data
- imported or interfaced primary objects
- a (logical) test-environment
- a physical hardware installation, with the right technical security
- etc.
According to scrum, these are elements should be connected to the backlog. In practice the development team has a high focus on making functionality, rather than considering this sort of planning logic. The Project Manager ensures this is professionally handled.