In order to come up with the best approach for project management for a project, we assess who the client is, what time availability they have, what expertise can they bring to the table, and what their expectation is with the delivery process - e.g. do they want to be more involved or less involved. Once we have a better idea about these client and project realities, we then build the process around these realities.

If we consider the aspect of expertise for example, if people at the client’s end are experienced in Scrum, then they can have in-house product owners and scrum masters. Sometimes, the client is the product owner whereas the scrum master is at Tintash. In other situations, clients have no previous experience with Scrum, and in these scenarios the Project Manager has to play a hybrid role where he/she has to play a role in product ownership and also help out the development team in implementing a Scrum like framework.

In terms of time availability, not every client or people from his/her team have the time to participate in daily standups, review meetings, planning meetings and retrospectives. If the client or other members of the team co-located with the client can participate in all of these events then that’s great. However, if they can’t, then we work around these constraints by making sure that we involve them as much as possible, while making sure that these Scrum events do at least take place between team members at Tintash to ensure that work progress is being checked daily, working software is being reviewed after each scrum cycle, and that effective planning is being done for the next cycle.