I think a project manager trying to run agile is almost a contradiction in terms.
Agile is usually a team practise which outsiders like a PM don't get a say in. The Product Owner feeds work in and stakeholders get to argue about the order of each item and that's all.
A retrospective allows the team to adjust their way of working to fit better to their situation and it is them that decide not some PM.
Standups are aimed at killing long status meetings and if they're not then something is wrong. The Ceremonies have a purpose and the overall purpose is to use the development resource that is available to do the things that most need to be done and not waste it on anything else.
To bring this back to the article - how can a project manager decide what is or isn't efficient for some team? How can they estimate anything when they are far from the details - no matter how much programming they did in the past?
> I think a project manager trying to run agile is almost a contradiction in terms.
I believe you can find that "contradiction in terms" at thousands of organizations these days. Probably more than are "running agile" without a "project manager".
I suggest that it's "agile in name only" because it was fashionable. The people at the top have probably bent it all back to waterfall because ... who knows - maybe it suits their style of thinking or makes them feel in control?
You described the point of view of an agile practitioner, leaning towards scrum. Could you contrast it with project manager's role? What's a project manager - a role eliminated by scrum - expected to do?
Presumably they become product managers or something like that and try to get a series of changes through various teams in a co-ordinated way that add up to some achievement or "project".
Their estimates have to be based on what teams predict and velocity and so on and on.
Agile is usually a team practise which outsiders like a PM don't get a say in. The Product Owner feeds work in and stakeholders get to argue about the order of each item and that's all.
A retrospective allows the team to adjust their way of working to fit better to their situation and it is them that decide not some PM.
Standups are aimed at killing long status meetings and if they're not then something is wrong. The Ceremonies have a purpose and the overall purpose is to use the development resource that is available to do the things that most need to be done and not waste it on anything else.
To bring this back to the article - how can a project manager decide what is or isn't efficient for some team? How can they estimate anything when they are far from the details - no matter how much programming they did in the past?