Conservative Project Manager (PM)

The Conservative Project Manager (PM) has worked years or decades with a waterfall-inspired methodology and has become a skeptic, or perhaps even a cynic, when it comes to the ability of the organization to develop itself and the way its employees collaborate.

Conservative PMs can appear to be somewhat resistant to change, often times greeting an agile initiative with sarcastic remarks and "that will never work here" attitudes.

Also, Conservative PMs, if involved in an agile transformation, may scoff at the idea that introducing more agile ways of working, is more of a journey than a project. To them, the project is the vehicle of change in an organization.

Conservative PMs may behave like this, because they can be afraid of losing their current level of power and influence in the organization, which introducing more agile ways of working often results in.

If the Conservative Project Manager is to continue a fruitful career in very agile organization, often times the PM will have to take on other roles, like those of Scrum Master, Product Owner or Business Analyst, which require a more facilitating skillset than the perhaps more controlling one they have been used to.