The Manager's Path

Doesn’t agile software development get rid of the need for project management? No. Agile software development is a great way to think about work because it forces you to focus on breaking tasks down into smaller chunks, planning those smaller chunks out, and delivering value incrementally instead of all at once. None of this means that you don’t need to understand how to do project management. You’ll have projects that for whatever reason can’t be completed in a single sprint, or even two small sprints. You’ll need to estimate project length for your management team, and give some detail on why you believe things will take that long. There are some projects, usually described by words like infrastructure, platform, or system, that require architecture or significant advanced planning. When faced with this kind of project, which includes many unknowns and relatively hard deadlines, you will find it doesn’t fit so well into the standard agile process.