It's slowly dawning on me

    In a recent exchange on Agile Project Management, it has finally dawned on me that when the agile software development advocates speak of project management they are not actually speaking of project management. They are speaking of managing software development. The production of code that is delivered to the customer. This code is "Part" of the project, but it in itself is not "the" project.
    Of course they firmly hold they are doing project management. And of course they are managing the production of software, as selected by the customer, in an iterative and incremental manner. But are they "managing the project" in the context found in the project management paradigm? Are they performing the processes that a project manager would perform if there was a named person performing that job description? Hard to say, since the conversation never seems to get to that point. And in the end it seems the project management processes are not the basis of the concept of "agile project management." Which of course redefines the whole concept of project management.
    But that's actually a moot point. I've come to realize that a conversation about project management processes can't actually take place. I've come to learn - the hard way it seems - not to actually engage in the conversation about "agile project management," if that conversation does not start with "project management," "project managers," and the activities performed by project managers.
    This is not to say in any way that writing software in some agile manner is not a critical success factor for any software development project - because of course it is. As well writing this software is pretty much the same - when using agile processes - in all domains I've every worked it. Ranging from simple small teams to complex weapons systems. The agile processes are generally applicable.
    But writing software is not Project Management, it's software development.
    The last thing I've learned from these conversations is that the statement above is not the starting point for the folks advocating agile project management, er I mean Agile Software Development.
    So the discussion of Agile Program Management is rarely about project management as a set of processes and almost always about the writing of software in an agile manner and the management of those processes. But since "agile software development process descriptions" don't always catch the eye of book editors, changing the phrase to Agile Project Management is a better marketing term.