Understanding Scrum Master vs. Project Manager Roles for PMP Exam Prep (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: When we are doing PMP exam preparation, many times our participants get confused the difference between scrum master role and a project manager role, because many times you learn in a scrum various activities like facilitation of a meeting, taking care of the teams, improving their high performance thing is associated with the scrum master role and these things may also get associated with the project manager role. So what is the difference between these two roles and how should I handle it when I am giving my PMP exam, that is something we are exploring here. So first thing is your scrum guide if you are learning scrum, if you are doing scrum certification, they do not recognize a role called project manager. So we need to learn it from fresh, we cannot rely on scrum certifications telling us what is the role of a project manager. Now if you are working in a product environment where you have a dedicated teams and they might be following pure scrum, you may not have a project manager. In those cases, your PMP theories may not be relevant also, but when you are working in a project environment, which means it is a temporary endeavor, it starts and finishes, you need to take care of stakeholder, you need to produce some kind of invoicing, you need to take care of some kind of documentation and it is something a complex stakeholder management you are using a project and inside it you are using scrum. Now that is the situation or that is the scenario where we are applying PMP competencies or PMP tools and techniques will be relevant in those spaces. So take first that project manager role is relevant when the project is getting executed and inside it we might be using scrum, so that is the first thing. Assuming I am working in a project now, can I have a scrum master or can the project manager become a scrum master or if they are both, how do we differentiate their work? So for a PMP exam perspective, we should keep in mind there could be a situation where you may have a multiple team environment, you might be working in the hybrid projects and some teams might be following scrum and you may have a scrum masters there. So whenever you see a question which shows that there are teams and there is a scrum master, you definitely delegate the responsibility of team handling, team management, team growth, team development, facilitation to the scrum master. So whatever we expect a team leader to do to take care of their team interaction should be taken care by the role if the question is showing it scrum master for those teams. But if that thing is not feasible, so that is the one scenario where project manager may come into the place where one project manager is there and there are multiple teams, some teams are having scrum master and scrum master can do their job. The second scenario in a PMP exam is also possible where the question shows that you are working in a small team and you need to take care of various facilitation work as well as a stakeholder interactions, risk management and quality processes as well. In those cases, you can assume the person called project manager might be also doing scrum master responsibilities. So it depends upon the question which you see in your exam because we cannot have a default guidelines. If you see the existence of a scrum master in the question and the option, you prefer to go with delegating the team level facilitation to the scrum master. But if you do not see the existence of scrum master in the question, then you do not shy and you do the responsibilities or activities which are associated with the scrum master as a project manager as well. So look at the question and look at the 4 choice and find the best option.